The Young Apollo and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

David is no Morgan. He's got the cart before the horse."
    Camilla was perfectly willing to concede this, but she didn't care. She and David were married six months after their first meeting. Her parents had urged a longer wait, but she had found the force to resist them, pressing down in her mind the ugly suspicion that she dreaded the effect of a longer wait on David's volatile nature. And David's parents, who still managed to live with a certain splash on the remnants of the ancestor's fortune and who were relieved that their excitable and impetuous son had selected so sensible and reliable a mate, managed to scrape up enough cash to see the young couple at least through their first year.
    Thus had started the decade and a half that was to elapse before the district attorney had issued his indictment against Stiles and Hunter and the last lights in Camilla's life flickered out.
    The first years, at least, had had their pleasant side. In the 1920s, David's firm made plenty of money, and he was able to buy the shiniest and longest of foreign cars and the fastest and noisiest of motorboats, to rent large summer villas in the Hamptons and to go off with chosen Racquet Club pals on distant and dangerous mountain-climbing expeditions or on African big-game shooting safaris. Camilla had always feared that the time would come when his mercurial mentality might begin to tire of her so much plainer and more placid disposition and tastes, and she patiently acquiesced in being left behind with their son when he took off for far parts of the globe, seeking to console herself with the illusion that the limitation of his company to males would guard him from the allurements of her own sex.
    He took for granted that she was totally content with her life. Was she not Mrs. David Hunter? What else could a woman want? "You know, Millie," he told her once, on his return from a fishing trip in the Arctic Circle, "it does a man good when he's freezing in below-zero temperatures to know there's a home fire always burning for him and a great little woman whose face will light up when he comes through the door. How's young David?" And then he looked for a corner of his mind not full of his latest adventure to devote briefly to David Junior, hugging him and spoiling him and buying him anything that he clamorously demanded at any price. And of course the boy adored him.
    But it was, predictably, a very different David who survived—and barely survived—the market crash of 1929. He seemed to regard the long depression that followed it as a personal affront aimed at him by a vindictive fate, and when Camilla, with all the calm and resolution that she could muster, attempted to adjust their lifestyle to the drastic reduction of their income, he resented her disinclination to join in his shrill complaints, as if she were somehow in conjunction with the forces of evil. If she ever protested at his stubborn insistence on continuing to buy the most expensive clothes for himself or at his refusal even to consider resigning from any of his clubs, he would ask her angrily if she expected him to take to the streets and hold out a tin cup. She knew that he was seeing a lot of Paul and Gloria Davison, at whose apartment he seemed to be always dropping in on his way home from work without asking her to join him, and she began to suspect that Gloria, the avid young blond wife of a much older and notoriously gullible millionaire, might be paying some of David's bills. Camilla remembered having read in a life of the first duke of Marlborough that he owed some of his amorous success as a dashing young officer to his habit of borrowing money from the ladies he seduced.
    And then, suddenly, David seemed almost rich again. He announced that he was renting a big house on the dunes in Southampton for the summer of 1936. But they were never to occupy it. David was fated to endure a very different kind of housing.
    He behaved well enough at his trial; he was always at