The Embezzler Read Online Free PDF Page A

anything. They were too serene ever to suffer from the acidulous suspicion that is the bane of the conservative; they smiled with a sniff at the future, just as they smiled with a shrug at the mention of a name that they did not know socially. They did everything one had to do well but not too well; excessive expertise in the saddle, at the card table, even on the golf course, might have seemed "showy." Only in clothes did they really let themselves go, as if from some deep consciousness that their true function was to decorate the stage of society and persuade the observer that it was real. When I think of them now, I think of grays and whites and blacks, of striped trousers never wrinkled, of maroon gleaming shoe leather, of pearl studs and gray spats and gloves, of canes and tall gray hats, of gray against emerald garden parties, of gray against the glittering blue of a Newport sea and under a bright sun. My uncles at least made measured sense out of a life that was notoriously a source of discontent to the many who lead it.
    Oh, they were bargains, all right, cheap for the relatively little they cost. They were faithful husbands, unlike the peers who followed them, and conscientious stewards of the money they had married. Like figures in Saint-Simon, they had implicit confidence in the validity of the social game as it was played from day to day. They grasped it by instinct, which was the only way to grasp a game without logic or even a set of rules, sensing intuitively which parvenu would make the grade and which divorcée would be forgiven, covering up the inconsistencies, like good priests of Mammon, with a mellifluous roll of generalities in which they at times almost believed. It is not surprising that their descendants should have totally lacked their style, for the later Primes inherited caution and thick skins with the maternal wealth, and concentrated more on the keeping of dollars than the making of friends. Indeed, by the time I grew up, the money of Fisks and Goulds and Villards had become so associated with my relatives that people began to believe there must have been a great Prime fortune. It was this legend, perpetuated in the social columns of a thousand evening journals, that created the particular problem of my youth.
    For my father, Percy Prime, had married for love. He was the brightest and the most attractive of the brothers and had been expected to make the greatest match. There was even, uniquely among Primes, something of the artist in his make-up, for he saw the world of parties as something that could be made as beautiful as one aspired. To him the organization of a cotillion or picnic, the seating of a dinner table, the selection of wines and music, were matters quite as important as the making or merger of corporations. There could be no point to the latter without the former, he always insisted, as there could be no point to splendid moneymaking without splendid expenditure. What saved him, as it saved his brothers, from the ridicule of his male contemporaries, was that in the role of social arbiter and adviser to hostesses, a role usually associated with the effeminate, or at least the epicene, he was uncompromisingly strict and masculine. Father was just as happy among the gentlemen after dinner as with the ladies at lunch. I see him now, with his chair pushed back, his long legs carefully crossed, leaning forward to place his brandy glass on the edge of the table and turning, with the easy deference of a trusted staff officer, to ask the richest man present his opinion of the last government intrusion upon industry. He knew little of such matters, but he knew how to ask a good question.
    It may have been precisely Father's trouble that he had too much imagination. It may have been why, in the short run as well as the long, his brothers did so much better. Bellevue Avenue and Fifth must have been at times the least bit nervous at what their images might be in Percy Prime's bright, blank,