Honorable Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

Fish house punch! Never again.” or “Mrs. Twining. Took me out of a business double. Nevermore!” But he always did go again; a good Bar Harborite never kept a good resolution.
    At Gus’s first dinner party that summer I found myself seated next to Jonathan Askew, a tall, baggy bachelor of twenty-seven, whose mother, Lady Lennox, had recently (for tax reasons, according to my all-knowing ma) abandoned the United Kingdom for her native land and had repurchased her parents’ old place, Arcadia, on a peninsula that gave her a double view of Frenchman’s Bay. Askew, the sole issue of her earlier American match, was making his first visit to Mount Desert.
    â€œWhat do young ladies like to talk about in Bar Harbor?” he asked me in a loud hollow tone, as if he were offering me a tray of goodies.
    I knew right away that this had to be Gus’s candidate. Askew, thanks to an ancestor who had invested first in the China trade and then in railroads, bore a famous name. He looked the part, too; he had a large aquiline nose, a high sloping forehead, curly auburn hair and watery gray eyes that stared at one blankly, haughtily, suspiciously. His voice was high and affected, and he moved his large body with a kind of arrogant clumsiness. He would have been perfectly cast in a Cecil B. DeMille film about a Roman emperor.
    I took a firm line.
    â€œYoung ladies in Bar Harbor like to talk about different things at different times,” I replied to his question. “When I have the honor of sitting next to an Askew, I feel inclined to ask what it feels like to be one.”
    â€œOh, it’s nothing so great.” He took his status as much for granted as if he had been a prince or a movie star. “It’s rather a bore, really. One can’t see why one’s all that different from another chap.”
    Chap. But of course he had been raised in England. “Aren’t you afraid that people are after your money?”
    His eyes widened. “The girls, you mean?”
    â€œAren’t they all dying to be Mrs. Askew? Perhaps you should confine your attentions to heiresses.”
    â€œMy mater says that makes no difference. According to her, the average heiress is even greedier than the poor girl. She would want what I have either to add to her pile or else as a guarantee that I wasn’t marrying her for
her
money.”
    This was my first glimpse of the sort of mother Lady Lennox must be. I felt almost sorry for him. “So that it’s impossible for you to be married except for mercenary reasons?”
    â€œSo it would seem,” he agreed gravely. “Unless I were to find someone indifferent to money. Someone who had enough accomplishment in her own right to be above material needs.”
    â€œYou mean a famous actress? An opera singer? A trapeze artist?”
    â€œWould I have to go quite so far? What about a famous debutante?”
    He was actually flirting! My lips parted in surprise. “But I thought they were the most dangerous of all! Why on earth would they become debutantes but to make good matches?”
    â€œI should have thought a girl who appeared on the cover of
Life
could pick just about any man she wanted.”
    â€œWell, Mrs. Simpson’s already got the King of England. So the rest of us will have to make do with simple dukes. And maybe here and there an Askew.”
    â€œOh, come, you’re pulling a fellow’s leg.”
    â€œI’ve never been more serious. Do you realize what I’ve staked in this game? My coming-out party represents my inheritance from my grandmother. And at the rate Mummie and Daddy are going, they’ll be totally bust in a few years’ time. I can promise you, Jonathan Askew, that I don’t relish the idea of becoming a waitress at Jordan’s Pond or begging Miss Herron to take me in as an assistant in her kindergarten.”
    â€œBut surely things can’t be that bad.” He looked