Honorable Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

suppose I can’t, can I?”
    â€œDon’t you think you could bring yourself to do something more creative?”
    â€œIt’s good of you to ask. I thought I might write a history of the Askews. These society reporter chaps, you know, get those things all botched up.”
    â€œIt so happens I do know something about that. But is there really so much point in unbotching it?”
    â€œWell, facts are facts, you know.”
    â€œDo I?”
    When I dropped him back at his house, we met Lady Lennox in the doorway, about to step into the little Bugatti in which she tore about the island at dangerous speeds. She was a large, much-powdered, false blonde, dressed in immaculate white. She leaned down to stare at me with glinting, mocking dark eyes.
    â€œSo you’re the famous Alida Struthers! I’m relieved to see you’ve brought my boy back in one piece.”
    â€œDid you think I would eat him up?”
    â€œWell, I’m not sure he could stop you—once you’d started!”
    â€œOh, come, Mother, that’s no way to talk to Alida!”
    She ignored him. “Come around some afternoon, my dear, and you and I will have a little chat alone. I was a debutante myself a century or so back. We might compare notes. Or is it just a case of
plus ça change
?”
    I decided boldness was the only way. “What I’d really like is a tip on how you did it.”
    â€œDid what?”
    â€œMarried an Askew.”
    Lady Lennox snorted. “You’d better watch out, Johnnie boy! This one plays with her cards on the table! They’re the worst.”
    I never did have that cozy chat with Lady Lennox, but I had several more walks with Jonathan. In fact, he attached himself to me as far as I would allow it, and he was constantly on the telephone when I would not. At the club he would join me and maintain a sulky silence if any other friends came by. If I sent him away, he would retire to the veranda and sit by himself, staring moodily across the lawn at me. And at the Saturday night dances he would have no partner but me.
    My feelings were ambivalent. I liked him; I even pitied him; and I enjoyed our long, rambling, rather childish talks. We told each other endless silly stories about ourselves and laughed at our friends and relatives. Alone with me, he showed a naive, sunny, confiding nature; his sulkiness and pride were only poses. He blandly announced that he was in love with me on our second walk and proposed to me on our third, but he made no clumsy efforts to kiss or maul me after I had told him firmly that I preferred to be let alone. And, of course, it was fun to have all Bar Harbor know that the scion of the Askews was at my beck and call. What an easy and obvious solution to all my problems!
    On the other hand, it went against my grain to know that everyone in the summer community, nay, every employee of the Swimming Club, every merchant on Main Street, was convinced that I was using all the tricks in my bag to capture a man whom I would have scorned had he not been an Askew. How could I bear to be so exactly what everyone thought me, to fit into the pattern of our crazy social fabric as neatly and as inevitably as the parents for whom I had never felt aught but contempt? I had turned myself into a newspaper debutante, and now it began to look as if I should be a newspaper bride.
    Lady Lennox seemed to penetrate my mind and to revel in reading it aloud to me. My dislike of her at last broke into the open one morning when I drove to her house to pick up Jonathan for our now daily walk. I had arrived a bit early, and as he was still upstairs dressing, I joined Lady Lennox on the patio, where she was finishing her breakfast. It was one of Mount Desert’s peerless days, and the sparkling sea dazzled, but Jonathan’s mother, blinking her black eyes at me, her powder caked in the glaze of the sunlight, seemed at once passive and dangerous, inert yet potentially