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And then, too, he was helpful about leases and contracts, and for those of them who cared, the income tax. What they did not know was that behind the tireless twinkle of those ceaselessly surveying grey eyes lay the serene conviction that they were dilettantes without any real existence and that once Leila had married him and moved to the red-brick truth of Stuyvesant Town and given birth to the first of a planned family of three, she would have no more time, as he put it to himself, to “wait for Godot.”
    Nor was his prediction unfulfilled. After Leila had become Mrs. Platt and the mother of little Jock, she began to be more critical of her old friends. They failed to recognize the pull of her new responsibilities, and if she and Jake wouldn’t stay at a party till dawn, they didn’t seem to care if she came at all. Thus the connection with Bohemia was gradually dissolved without Jake’s having once to suggest it. But what he had not anticipated was that her abandonment of old affiliations did not bring with it any immediate enthusiasm for new ones. Leila viewed the Saturday night supper parties which they now attended, made up entirely of young lawyers and their wives, mostly from Tower, Tilney & Webb, with a more jaundiced eye than he quite liked.
    â€œIt’s bad enough with the men,” she complained on their way home from one of these, “though at least one expects them to talk shop. But Margy Schlide! She keeps it up even with the girls. She told me tonight that Barry had to make partner this year or never and that his chances were exactly two out of five.”
    â€œHow does she figure that out? I would have said they weren’t one in a hundred.”
    â€œBecause he didn’t go to Harvard, I suppose.” Leila had preserved intact from her Village days the prejudice that firms like Tower, Tilney & Webb selected their partners exclusively from Harvard.
    â€œNo, of course not. Relatively few of the associates went to Harvard. I didn’t go to Harvard myself.”
    â€œNo, but you might as well have. You have that cool, snooty look that poor Barry will never develop.”
    Jake paused to control his irritation and to recapture the look which his wife had described. “It’s not the way Barry looks or talks that’s against him,” he explained in a judicial tone. “The powers that be aren’t so superficial. It’s the way he
acts.
”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œWell, he calls even the young partners ‘sir’ for example. And he doubles up with laughter every time one of them makes a joke. He’s always polishing the apple. That sort of thing doesn’t go downtown.”
    â€œYou mean, if it’s too obvious?”
    â€œNo, Leila, I don’t mean that at all. Naturally, none of us wants to be an associate all his life. But most of the boys expect to make the grade by hard work and not politics. If Barry Schlide became a partner, he’d turn Tower, Tilney into a kind of Oriental court, with bowing and salaaming and stabbing in the back.”
    â€œPoor Barry and Marg,” said Leila wistfully. “I see them wandering about in their turbans amid all the grey flannel suits. But is that what’s wrong with them? Are they the only ones in costume, or are they the only ones who
aren’t?
And why do you all care so?”
    Jake did not answer; in his opinion the discussion had gone quite far enough. It was inevitable that Leila, with her quick, inquiring mind, should eventually find out the truth about the legal and business worlds, about all worlds, for that matter, but he wanted it to come little by little. It was not in the least that he was ashamed of the truth or of his own ambition. Every man who was worth his salt cared, pretty much to the exclusion of anything else, about his own promotion. What else mattered, in the anthill which the world was becoming, but to acquire a bit of space for oneself and