The Rich Are Different Read Online Free PDF

off with Chloe to get a divorce. It was like a shoddy version of
Jane Eyre
, with my father playing a fifth-rate Mr Rochester …’
    The saga continued in baroque style. Her mother had departed when Harry Slade had refused to give up drinking, and Miss Slade had spent two years at her grandparents’ Lincolnshire rectory. ‘My grandparents wanted to keep me after my mother died, but I wanted so much to get back to Mallingham …’
    I noted the substitution of Mallingham for her father but made no comment. Presently we had reached Slade’s third marriage to a chorus girl who had insisted that her stepdaughter be sent away to boarding school – ‘Though I had the last laugh there,’ said Miss Slade, ‘because I loved Cheltenham’ – and we then proceeded to the saga’s gory climax: Harry Slade’s alcoholic breakdown, temporary recovery and his eventual death from cirrhosis of the liver.
    ‘I had to look after him when my stepmother walked out with Percy,’ said Miss Slade. ‘I was his keeper. It was frightful. I think I’d have gone mad if I hadn’t escaped to Cambridge. And then of course he had the nerve to die broke and intestate. Wasn’t that the absolute frozen limit?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Hesounds a fool. But you’re no fool, are you, Miss Slade? All that rigmarole about an Electra complex was merely a device to maintain my interest in your admittedly unusual situation. Tell me, why do you avoid talking of your mother?’
    She went bright red. ‘My mother died of tetanus. I don’t want to talk about it.’
    ‘It’s an ill wind, as they say. At least her death allowed you to go back to Mallingham.’
    She opened her mouth to speak but no words came. A waiter poured her some more champagne. My own glass was still standing untouched beside my plate of Dover sole.
    ‘Let me see if I’ve understood your situation,’ I said amicably. ‘You despised your father and your refusal to discuss your mother indicates you’ve rejected her too. Your half-brother wants to deprive you of your home and your half-sister isn’t lifting a finger to stop him, so they can hardly be considered your friends, particularly when your home means so much to you. You’re destitute and desperate but whether by skill, judgement or just plain good luck you’ve thought of an interesting idea for making money. I made a couple of calls this afternoon. Cosmetics today happens to be an interesting field – more interesting than I’d anticipated. It’s a pity that a woman’s considered a bad business risk.’
    ‘But I’m just as well educated as any man!’
    ‘Forget it, Miss Slade. In the world where you’re going to have to earn your living, you won’t have the chance to scan iambic pentameters.’
    ‘Are you trying to tell me you’re going to turn me down because I’m a woman?’
    I sighed. ‘Don’t waste your emancipated rage on me, my dear, because my mother and sister proved to me early in life that women can be just as able intellectually as any man under the sun. Believe me, if I turn you down it won’t be because I think you’re a member of an inferior species. It’ll be because I know all too well what a handicap your sex would be in the world of commerce where other men hold less enlightened views than mine.’
    ‘People can overcome handicaps,’ said Miss Slade.
    ‘You might find this handicap too severe. I doubt if you could rise above it.’
    ‘Oh yes, I could!’ she said fiercely.
    I stared at her. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that if she had been a man I would have unhesitatingly added her to my list of protégés. For years I had made a hobby of picking out unlikely people and watching them climb to prominence against long odds.
    ‘How can I prove myself to you?’ she said, just as O’Reilly and Steve Sullivan and a dozen others had all said to me in the past. And then she said in a rush: ‘When
you
were my age did you never once have your back to the wall? And if you did,