The Young Apollo and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

happy after the war to find a desk in the brokerage house of Jonathan Stiles & Son, where it was hoped that his looks and still stylish connections might attract investors.
    He and Camilla hit it off at once. She was pretty enough to attract even a man who had his choice of her sex, and the badinage that she had learned from her new college friends struck him as livelier than that of the usual New York debutante. Besides, she was a good listener.
    "Do you know what, Miss Townsend? The war hasn't just made the world safe for democracy, as President Wilson has said. It's made the world safe for young people, like you and me. We're not going to be confined as our parents were to all the petty dos and don'ts of the generation before us. We're going to be free to blaze new trails, to make our own rules for the game of life!"
    Camilla had had enough of her mother's much-vaunted common sense pounded into her to suspect that this was the kind of thing that all the young men were saying, but she had also been indoctrinated in the maternal principle that a wise woman learns to tolerate, and even on occasion to applaud, banality in the opposite sex.
    "A year in the trenches," she observed, "must have had the educative value of ten in an ordinary life. So it almost puts you ahead of the older generation."
    "You see that, do you? It's because you're smart, Miss Townsend. I like smart women. The cute little 'you're so big and strong' type bore the bejesus out of me, if you'll pardon my French."
    He had been only briefly at the front by the time of the armistice, but he certainly made the most of it, and he had the gift of talking about himself without either boring his listener or appearing arrogant. Or was it just the charm of his youth and beauty? Camilla didn't care, and knew that she didn't care. She was already well on her way to being pulverized. He went on to tell her that he intended to make a fortune on Wall Street and that he would spend it in ways to make even his most flamboyant forebears look like cheapskates. He absolutely declined to turn to his other neighbor at the serving of the roast, as etiquette then required, and blandly insisted on monopolizing Camilla in the parlor after dinner, also in flagrant contradiction of the established practice of mingling. Obviously, she didn't mind at all.
    She would have only too many occasions then and in later years to wonder why love is so often described as blind. It was certainly never so in her own case. She had been aware from the beginning of her relationship with David that however attractive she might have been, what had really immediately drawn him to her was the only too apparent effect that he could see he had made on her. But how long would that last?
    For a while anyway, and that while was hers. He called at the house almost daily; he brushed aside her college commitments as so many flies and took her to expensive restaurants, where he held forth exuberantly on his great plans for a future in which he seemed to take silently for granted that she would play an admiring role. Camilla knew that she had tumbled to the bottom of the dark abyss of love and listened with controlled patience to her mother's now freely expressed doubts as to David's financial future. Eva's original enthusiasm for him had been qualified by later acquaintance.
    "There's certainly no doubt as to his capacity to spend money. He has inherited plenty of that talent. But I'm much less sure of his capacity to earn it. David wants to make a fortune in order to be able to squander it. He doesn't seem to realize that most of our great tycoons built their fortunes out of the love of building. Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller—those men weren't interested in spending their piles. The accumulation was everything to them. It was up to their descendants to dispose of the loot. And the descendants were more than ready to take care of
that.
Mr. Morgan was different, but Mr. Morgan was
born
a rich man. And anyway,