The Dark Lady by Louis Auchincloss, Thomas Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page B

other two women, magazine editors, were decorative without being competitive, and Irving, large, leonine, gravel-voiced, made a splendid guest of honor.
    "Trust the Judge to assert the rights of the great proprietors," Sam Gorman chuckled. "I can just see you, Irving, as the master of a harem, striding through it, like Rembrandt's Grand Turk."
    "And I can see you, too, Gorman. Perhaps in a different capacity."
    "That should teach you to cross swords with Irving, Sam!"
    "But, Elesina, if he's a Grand Turk and I'm a eunuch, what do you think that makes
you?
" Sam retorted. He appealed to the others. "Don't you think Elesina's an odalisque? I find her decidedly an odalisque!"
    "Then look after your charges," Elesina told him, handing him her glass. "Get me a drink. I want to hear Fred's reply to Irving's interesting observation."
    "Orientals are not relevant to the issue," Pemberton responded dogmatically. "The pashas simply strangled naughty wives; they did not become suicidal over them. They were realists. The stout walls of the harem indicated a healthy awareness that the weaker sex might be expected to bolt at the first opportunity. But somewhere along the line Christian society went off the tracks. It may have had to do with the deification of the Virgin. A man raised to believe that there was something holy in virginity could only forgive the woman who surrendered hers to himself. But I admit that the aberration produced some of the most beautiful poetry in the world. Art often flourishes on a denial of nature."
    "I confess I have always been something of a medievalist," Irving observed. "Like Henry Adams, I am inclined to Mariolatry."
    "Ah, one can see that in the divine Clara," Gorman exclaimed impertinently. "You have enshrined her at Broadlawns. It is your Chartres!"
    Ivy was a bit uneasy at this, though Irving appeared to take it as a compliment. She decided it was time to move her guests in to dinner, where she placed Irving, to his barely contained displeasure, at the opposite end of the table from Elesina. Her plan cost her his cooperation during the meal, for he remained for the most part rather sullenly silent, but she knew that she could count on Fred Pemberton to keep things going, and her reward came later when they returned to the living room and Irving pressed angrily close behind her.
    "I trust I shall be allowed two words with Miss Dart before I go home?"
    Ivy stared with affected surprise. "Why, Irving, you old darling, of course! What
can
I have been thinking of?"

    At midnight, when the guests were gone, Elesina, glass in hand, stared moodily into the dying fire.
    Ivy, back from locking the front door, asked: "Well?"
    "I feel like a whore. And what do you think that makes
you?
"
    "Our customers didn't pay anything. We must be novices in the business."
    "Novices! Everything went just as you planned. I shall have no trouble raising the money for the play. No trouble, that is, other than we anticipated."
    "And what did we anticipate?"
    Elesina turned now to look at her scornfully. "I shall have to sleep with him, of course."
    "Did he say so?"
    "What do you take him for? He's a gentleman. But we know what these understandings are."
    "The madam doesn't."
    "Oh, Ivy, stop being funny."
    Ivy came over to take an opposite seat by the fire. "All right, I'll be serious. If you become Irving Stein's mistress, I shall never have anything to do with you again."
    Elesina seemed only mildly surprised. "You wish me to lead him on?"
    "Certainly not. I want you to be perfectly direct and perfectly honest. I want you to marry him." Elesina continued to contemplate the embers. "Fred Pemberton is not altogether the ass he seems. He has some shrewd insights. We women have been unjustly treated. Oh, I'm not talking about the political side," she added as she saw Elesina's shrug. "I'm no militant. I can make do with things as they are. But men have to be jockeyed a bit. There is no reason why Irving should not make up for what