The Lady of Situations by Louis Auchincloss

some of the boys wear expensive suits and ties. Fortunately my sex doesn't go in for clothes the way yours does. In a girls' school they have to wear uniforms. It's a funny system, but it works. What outsiders find it almost impossible to believe is that there's no snobbishness
inside
Averhill."
    "Because they're all from the same class?"
    He preferred another term. "All from the same background. In the same way there's no anti-Semitism."
    "Because there are no Jews?" There was a note of irony in her tone.
    He didn't get it. "Exactly. It's a kind of ethnic vacuum."
    "And what happens when they graduate? Do they carry these fine Christian principles with them through life?"
    He smiled, but it was not a smile that conceded much. "We do our best, we really do. And you know what Browning wrote: 'But a man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?'"
    Natica's conception of Averhill had been as a symbol of power, glittering, even admirable in its aloofness and pride. She had not understood that its board of trustees had deemed it politic or maybe necessary to cover it with wrappings quite so idealistic. And now she saw that this earnest man was precisely what they needed. He believed it all. He really did!
    Well, why not? she asked herself, as she drank her wine and leaned back in her seat. What had her life really taught her but that cynicism got one nowhere?
    He went on to talk at considerable length about the school, which was obviously his passionate, perhaps his only real interest. It did not seem to occur to him that their conversation was one-sided, though he did ask her some questions about her courses at Barnard which he found a bit deficient in American literature. She felt an immediate conviction that
Moby-Dick
and
Huckleberry Finn
were his favorite novels and decided it was not the moment to express her own preference for Henry James. Her mother had probably been right that he was looking for a wife, one who would fit in with faculty at Averhill. Of course, he would have to fall in love—his sincerity would require no less a state—but he would have no trouble with that once he had found the girl who qualified.
    By the time he had driven her home he had become very friendly indeed, and she wondered if he would kiss her. She hoped he would. But instead he said:
    "Will you go out with me again, Natica? I mean real soon? I think I should warn you that I'm beginning to like you very much."
    "And I like you, Tom," she replied in a firm, no-nonsense tone and walked to her front door without turning back.
    Two nights later they went out again to the same restaurant, and he told her about his life. His background was modest. His father was an Episcopal minister in Burlington, Vermont, where Tom and his only sibling, a brother, had gone to school and college. Both had graduated from the seminary in Cambridge and the brother was now a missionary in Nigeria. Tom had gone straight to Averhill where he had been teaching sacred studies and history and assisting the headmaster in chapel for five years. He admired Dr. Lockwood immensely and, of course, did not say anything about the possibility of succeeding him, but Natica knew that the post required a clergyman and Tom did mention that the rector would probably not retire for another decade. At forty, with fifteen years' experience at the school, would he not be just the man to whom the trustees would naturally turn?
    He told her nothing about other girls in his life, but this time, when he took her home, he parked down the road and they necked vigorously for half an hour. Yet he was evidently a very disciplined man, for he made no move to go further, and she was very hot and flushed and unsatisfied when she went to bed.
    Tom was handsomer, it seemed to her, when she wasn't looking at him. Absent, or viewed from a distance in the pulpit, he could suggest an English poet of the Georgian or pre-World War era, a kind of Rupert Brooke, whose love of beautiful words in