Honorable Men Read Online Free PDF

bewildered. “You wouldn’t be living the way you are if that were the case. And you wouldn’t be ... well, you certainly wouldn’t be...”
    â€œTelling you?” I finished for him. “To your face? Why not? I’m like the trick man who shows you his outstretched palms and lets you search his pockets before he picks a gold piece out of your ear. It’s a question of skill. Professional skill. You’d better watch out, my friend. Or don’t go out at night on Mount Desert Island without your mummie to protect you!”
    I continued in this jocose vein, ignoring his pleas that I be “serious,” until it was time to turn to my other neighbor. Askew was oblivious of the rules of dinner table conversation; he seemed to feel quite entitled to monopolize my attention. I had to show him my back to keep him from butting in. And after dinner, when he should have joined one of the ladies who had not been his neighbor at table, he made his deliberate way to the sofa where I was sitting.
    â€œReally, Mr. Askew,” I protested, “how is our host to entertain his guests properly if you are so unruly?”
    Looking very cross, he actually left the party! When I got home at midnight Mother was still up with her eternal needlepoint, listening to the radio. She switched it off at once when I told her whom I had sat next to.
    â€œHe’s staying with his mother, of course. I suppose he considers it slumming after Newport.”
    â€œIs he as rich as they say?”
    â€œWho says so? The Askews believe in primogeniture. His cousin Matthew got the bulk of the fortune. Of course, Jonathan came into what he has early, when his father was killed playing polo. It was a long minority. I suppose he may have five millions.”
    â€œWell, isn’t that enough?”
    â€œFor what? For a man who thinks he’s entitled to fifty? I’m sure Jonathan feels he’s been very badly treated indeed.”
    I should say here that Mother, for all her rapt concern with the social game, never once tried to make a match for me. She seemed to regard it as an entertainment that had no necessary relation to her family.
    â€œWhat is Lady Lennox like?”
    â€œShe tries to be that tough, down-to-earth, damn-your-eyes British type. You know, heavy gold jewelry, tweeds, and dogs all over the place. She has one qualification for the role, anyway. A tin heart.”
    â€œYou mean she doesn’t give a damn for Jonathan?”
    â€œShe doesn’t give a damn for anyone.”
    I was not really surprised when Askew called me the next morning. I knew when I had made a hit. He asked me if I would take him on one of my walks up a mountain. He explained that Gus had informed him that I knew them all.
    â€œI’ll pick you up at ten,” I told him crisply. “We can do Jordan and then lunch at the tea house.”
    He huffed and puffed a good deal going up the trail, for he was obviously not used to much physical exercise, yet he insisted on talking all the way. As soon as he dropped the arrogant manner, which I divined was really a cover of shyness, he became confiding and rather sweet. He had never, so far as I could make out, done a thing with his life, or even seriously contemplated doing one. He had been brought up to consider that being an Askew was an occupation in itself, like being royalty. Yet he was not really conceited; he was almost humble about the little that his confused mishmash of European schools had taught him. I gathered that he had spent most of his life in the disordered wake of an aggressive mother. One of the things he seemed proudest of was that he had spent a whole winter in London tutoring his younger half sister, Amy Lennox, because her psychiatrist had pronounced her too tense and indrawn to endure a strange teacher. Obviously, his mother was a horror.
    â€œBut you can’t just be a family tutor all your life,” I pointed out.
    â€œNo, I