The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy Page B

going, and, though Mrs. La Plante would telephone repeatedly, he would always refuse, with a hungry nostalgia in his eyes.
    At first I regarded his behavior as perverse, and used to remonstrate with him about it. Mrs. La Plante was just a bargain hunter, he would answer; a dealer had to cheat himself every time he sold her anything. I would conjure up the free meals, the drinks, and he would reply that Mrs. La Plante had too many people on the place. Naturally, Mrs. La Plante was such a Very Good Thing that Mr. Sheer was not the first nor the last to get wind of her, and it was true, as I began to notice, that Mr. Sheer was shy. He avoided strangers, particularly in large groups, and the volume of our correspondence testified to the fact that he would rather tackle a customer by mail, though this was a notoriously ineffective sales approach, than by telephone or in person. He found it still more comfortable to communicate with a customer through a letter written by someone else; in that way Mr. Sheer hardly figured in the deal at all. It was because I composed the letters that Mr. Sheer considered me invaluable as a stenographer; before my day he used to persuade a couple of elderly Country Life journalists to dictate descriptions of the new items to the girl in the office, descriptions which, as I discovered from the files, had had an odd sporting flavor. “This is a champion,” a letter would announce of a fine faïence vase.
    Nevertheless, I could not believe that it was the fear of meeting all the other gentlemen of the luxury trades that kept Mr. Sheer away from Mrs. La Plante’s. Perhaps there had been some question of quid pro quo, and he had defended himself as stoutly as Hippolytus.
    There was certainly something stoical about his face, as, accepting the loan of the train fare from me, he set out that week end for Long Beach.
    He returned on Monday morning, hollow-eyed. Two well-dressed young men with excellent manners escorted him into the gallery. “This is Fred, Miss Sargent, and this is Ernest,” he said. “They drove me in.” In some indefinable way they seemed like a bodyguard.
    “She bought the screen,” he announced when we were alone, “but, Miss Sargent, I’ll never do it again. I didn’t get a wink of sleep.”
    I did not answer. I knew that what Mr. Sheer had done was absolutely necessary, yet I found myself unable to stifle my distaste.
    “Oh, Miss Sargent, it was terrible,” he said, and took a long breath.
    “You don’t have to tell me about it,” I said angrily.
    “You mean you could see it?” he asked.
    “See what?”
    “About the boys …”
    Mrs. La Plante, Mr. Sheer explained, had lately been monopolized by three young men—a dress designer, a decorator, and a real-estate operator—who were exploiting the old lady far more systematically than any previous parasites had done. It was the decorator and the real-estate man I had just met. No one before had ever been able to tolerate more than a week end at a time of Mrs. La Plante’s conversation, but the three young men were now living on the premises, doing needlework, knitting, and playing with the toy spaniels. They were not gigolos in the ordinary sense; they were just good company. To Mrs. La Plante they were her dear boys, and they in turn were fiercely possessive about the old lady, so possessive that they made a week-end visit a nightmare for an outsider. A jeweler had found a garter snake in his bed; a furrier had got a Mickey Finn; Mr. Sheer had been ducked, wearing one of his two suits, in the swimming pool—and Mrs. La Plante had been in a continuous spasm of merriment. “The boys make me young again,” she told Mr. Sheer. One by one, the ordinary merchants had dropped off. Mr. Sheer had hung on for a while, but even he could not sustain it. “They’re so petty and malicious, Miss Sargent,” he complained. “It broke my heart to see the way they were milking that innocent old lady.” When the boys had begun