Edith Wharton - SSC 09 Read Online Free PDF Page A

many perfectly
unegoistical women Catherine Glenn had no subject of conversation except her
own affairs; and these at present so visibly hinged on the Browns that it was
easy to see why silence was simpler.
                 Mrs.
Brown, I may as well confess, bored me acutely. She was a perfect specimen of
the middle-aged flapper, with layers and layers of hard-headed feminine craft
under her romping ways. All this I suffered from chiefly
because I knew it was making Mrs. Glenn suffer. But after all it was
thanks to Mrs. Brown that she had found her son; Mrs. Brown had brought up
Stephen, had made him (one was obliged to suppose) the whimsical dreamy
charming creature he was; and again and again, when Mrs. Brown outdid herself
in girlish archness or middle-aged craft, Mrs. Glenn’s wounded eyes said to
mine: “Look at Stephen; isn’t that enough?”
                 Certainly
it was enough; enough even to excuse Mr. Brown’s jocular allusions and arid
anecdotes, his boredom at Les Calanques, and the too-liberal potations in which
he drowned it. Mr. Brown, I may add, was not half as trying as his wife. For
the first two or three days I was mildly diverted by his contempt for the quiet
watering-place in which his women had confined him, and his lordly conception
of the life of pleasure, as exemplified by intimacy with the head-waiters of
gilt-edged restaurants and the lavishing of large sums on horse-racing and
cards. “Damn it, Norcutt, I’m not used to being mewed up in this kind of place.
Perhaps it’s different with you—all depends on a man’s standards, don’t it? Now before I lost my money—” and
so on. The odd thing was that, though this loss of fortune played a
large part in the conversation of both husband and wife, I never somehow
believed in it—I mean in the existence of the fortune. I hinted as much one day
to Mrs. Glenn, but she only opened her noble eyes reproachfully, as if I had
implied that it discredited the Browns to dream of a fortune they had never
had. “They tell me Stephen was brought up with every luxury. And besides—their
own tastes seem rather expensive, don’t they?” she argued gently.
                 “That’s
the very reason.”
                 “The reason—?”
                 “The
only people I know who are totally without expensive tastes are the
overwhelmingly wealthy. You see it when you visit palaces. They sleep on
camp-beds and live on boiled potatoes.”
                 Mrs.
Glenn smiled. “Stevie wouldn’t have liked that.”
                 Stephen
smiled also when I alluded to these past splendours. “It must have been before
I cut my first teeth. I know Boy’s always talking about it; but I’ve got to
take it on faith, just as you have.”
                 “Boy—?”
                 “Didn’t
you know? He’s always called ‘Boy.’ Boydon Brown—abbreviated
by friends and family to ‘Boy.’ The Boy Browns. Suits them, doesn’t it?”
                 It
did; but I was not sure that it suited him to say so.
                 “And
you’ve always addressed your adopted father in that informal style?”
                 “Lord,
yes; nobody’s formal with Boy except head-waiters. They bow down to him; I
don’t know why. He’s got the manner. I haven’t. When I go to a restaurant they
always give me the worst table and the stupidest waiter.” He leaned back
against the sand-bank and blinked contentedly seaward. “Got a cigarette?”
                 “You
know you oughtn’t to smoke,” I protested.
                 “I
know; but I do.” He held out a lean hand with prominent knuckles. “As long as Kit’s not about.” He called the marble angel,
his mother, “Kit”! And yet I was not offended—I let him do it, just as I let
him have one of my cigarettes. If “Boy” had a way with head-waiters his adopted
son