Skinny Island by Louis Auchincloss Page A

what you really and truly want?"
    "Yes!"
    "And you really and truly believe it's for our greater happiness?"
    "Oh, I do!"
    "Then I agree."
    "Angel!" He swept her into his arms, wondering wildly if it wasn't dangerous to be so happy. Then his eye took in the rows of presents over her shoulder. "Look at all this crazy gold and silver! Doesn't it seem to be laughing at us?"
    She disengaged herself from his embrace. "These things, of course, must all be sent back."
    "What do you mean?"
    "If we cancelled the reception and kept the presents, we'd be guilty of a fraud. People expect something for what they've spent."
    Griswold, stunned, began to move slowly along one of the tables. "Good heavens, what a job!" He picked up a silver epergne and put it down. He leaned over a magnificent George II tray. A horrible thought struck him. "But, lone, all this stuff is monogrammed with our initials."
    "It does make it awkward, I admit. But it can hardly alter the principle."
    Griswold now began feverishly to examine the different objects. A complete set of the finest damask table linen from his aunt Eleanor Frost, with the huge woven letters
G
and
I
interlaced over an
N.
A set of gold service plates from his aunt Julia Post similarly dedicated; a vast diamond clip pin from his aunt Mabel Onderdonk with the fatal initials set in sapphires. On and on—there seemed no end to it.
    "We can't do it," he groaned. "We just can't do it!"
    "Then we must go through with the reception."
    And he knew now that he would never know whether or not she had believed, even for a minute, that they wouldn't.

Marcus: A Gothic Tale
    M ARCUS SUMNER had been one of the first students at Clare when the school had opened, a circle of Tudor gray on a verdant tract of land near Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1905. The young founding headmaster, the Reverend Philemon Forrester, had inspired the confidence of Marcus's banking father, who, like all of his peers in Manhattan, holding to the creed that male progeny could be educated only in New England, had sent his ailing and precocious motherless child to be placed under the special care of the principal and his wife. Marcus, happy to be removed from the tutelage of his stern, elderly sire, and protected from the roughness of schoolmates by the headmaster, in whose house he actually lived, had sunk deep roots in the Forrester family and had grown up as a kind of adoring eldest son or younger brother of Philemon. When he graduated from Clare he spent only the necessary four years at Harvard before returning to the expanded school to become its youngest faculty member and to dedicate his life and the fortune that he had now inherited from his deceased parent to the glory of Clare and Philemon Forrester.
    The latter was a huge man with a great square blocky head and long, prematurely gray locks that suggested the cleric of an earlier era. He was so moving a preacher that many deplored his isolation in a private school, and there were always those ready to propose him for a bishopric. But Forrester seemed contented in that smaller sphere, which he dominated so absolutely. The souls of four hundred boys were enough for him, plus the parishioners of neighboring churches in which he regularly preached, and the readers of his published sermons and spiritual poems. He was happy to labor in his own vineyard, regarding his oratorical gift as an endowment from God for that purpose. And was he really good enough even for that? There were moments when, standing in the pulpit before commencing an address, the eyes under those bushy eyebrows tightly closed in silent orison, he seemed to be clutching for an inspiration that might at any time be withdrawn.
    Marcus Sumner, on the other hand, small, spindly and pale, with thick blond hair and green burning eyes, deprived by a fibrillating heart of all sports but sailing, and that only with a crew for the heavy work, found in the mansion of the headmaster's soul enough rooms for