False Gods by Louis Auchincloss

his face and making rasping sounds from behind it. But Mr. Aspinwall's indifference to the world was interpreted in his family as gentle kindliness and his platitudes as the tip of a concealed iceberg of wisdom.
    Horace's two younger sisters, Chattie and Lizzie, were much alike, plain and bumptious, prone to ecstatic enthusiasms and sudden storms of tears, and given at table to high screeches of laughter after whispered confidences soon subdued by a glance from their rarely amused mother. They had kind hearts, however, and the warmth of their sympathy supplied the sex appeal with which they both ultimately obtained surprisingly attractive husbands.
    Stewart, the eldest, aspired to be the dapper dandy of the day. He was always immaculately and colorfully dressed, but saved from foppishness at a rather high cost by the rigidity of his stature, the length of his nose and the cold stare of his grey eyes. He resembled his younger cousin Gurdon, but had few of his brains. He loved to play the man of the world, the showy soul of courtesy in the drawing room to the ladies, but always ready with a sly poke in my ribs to assure me that he was equally welcome in very different female company. His mother unaccountably adored him, almost to the exclusion of her other children.
    How could she fail to see that Horace was the star of the family? But she did fail. And so did the others. Oh, the girls were fond enough of him in their demonstrative way; they responded to his good looks and shrieked at his jokes; Stewart found him a gratifying confidant for his amorous adventures; and even Mr. Aspinwall preferred him to the others as a fishing companion. But they couldn't, any of them, see that he was as strange an occupant of their noisy nest as if the egg from which he hatched had been deposited there by some irresponsible cuckoo bird. And with his mother I suspect it was something worse. I think she may have understood that Horace,
for all his ostensible consideration of her aches and pains, had penetrated to the root of her inveterate selfishness. She may even have disliked him. For she made one flat statement to me: "Horry has shown me less affection than any of my other children. I wonder whether his isn't a cold nature."
    She should have known!
    Dorothy came to dinner on the Saturday night of my weekend visit. It was a tense occasion for Horace, as it was the first time she had met his parents, and I think he had waited for my moral support. She was very much what I had imagined: the serious, direct young lady of the era, determined not to be taken in by the "gold sachet" of its opulence and to find a life of civic usefulness compatible with a woman's domestic role. Looking back, I can see how little progress these brave young society women had really made; they were basically already mortgaged to their parents' standards. But though lacking any kind of subtle female charm, Dorothy was fresh and healthy and ... well, I guess the adjective is "good." I have already used it about Horace. I could see perfectly why he was in love with her.
    He wanted Dorothy and me to have a chance to chat alone, so he led us to a corner of the parlor where we waited for his mother to come down.
    "Will you be going to law school, too, Mr. Leonard?" she asked me. I nodded. "I'm sure it's a fine career for a man."
    "You sound as if you weren't entirely sure."
    She was surprised to be so promptly taken up. "Well, my father always says he'd rather be a client."
    "I suppose he hires lawyers by the dozen. He says to this one 'Come' and he cometh, and to that one 'Go' and he goeth."
    "Now you're laughing at me, Mr. Leonard."
    "Not at all. For I quite see his point. Why not be the boss while you're at it? But what I like about the idea of being a lawyer, particularly a lawyer for businessmen and bankers, is that you're always dealing with the basic underpinnings of organized society. You can think and philosophize while you're making money. Most men act in a