The Lady of Situations by Louis Auchincloss Page A

no way implied a bohemian point of view or precluded a passionate patriotism. But close to him, she couldn't but note that his large brown eyes were too close together, his lips too thick, his oblong chin somehow suggestive more of stubbornness than of strength of character, though it didn't necessarily deny the latter. He seemed all sincerity and openness; his frank friendly stare and self-deprecating smile or chuckle appeared to be telling her, apropos of his particular enthusiasms, that if he liked grand opera he had no objection to her preferring chamber music, if he believed in private church schools it was not to knock public education, or if he believed in God, he was sure that the Almighty would forgive her agnosticism. Tom, in short, seemed anxious to assure her that his world was only one of many, but did he really believe it?
    But, more importantly, did she really care whether he did? Her languid mood in that slow hot summer seemed not to change. There was something easy and comfortable, in their steady dating of the following days, about the assured flow of his respectable opinions. She allowed herself lazily and rather luxuriously to bask on the sunny beach of an existence where nothing was expected of her but to let this positive and gentle man take the lead in everything.
    One Sunday morning, listening to his sermon in church and glancing from his spotless surplice to the gray harbor and seagulls through the open pane of the stained glass window by her pew, she found herself envisioning a visit to the rectory after the service to discuss the day's homily which would draw them into a deeper relation. She imagined him pausing in his too prosy explication, suddenly inarticulate, half choked; she felt his hands around her and then under her skirt; she heard his desperate, mumbled apology, and then suddenly it was too much for both of them. They were on the couch amid a flurry of skirt and panties and black robe and surplice and nakednesses, and she experienced with a sigh of relief, echoed by his own, the hard rhythm of his thrusts.
    "What were you thinking about during the sermon?" her mother asked as they came out of church. "You seemed a million miles away."
    "I was thinking I'd better marry Tom," Natica replied flatly.

5
    W HEN NATICA came to Averhill the following September as the wife of the assistant chaplain, she found herself a smaller cog in its academic wheelworks than she had anticipated. This was not because of her exiguous living quarters. At such short notice the school could not be expected to provide a cottage for a new faculty bride, and she rather liked the little apartment improvised in the abandoned "Pest House," a one-story bungalow just off campus where boys with contagious illnesses had been confined before the erection of the new infirmary, although the windows of the latter were so close to her own that she had to keep the shades drawn. Nor was it because her husband cut a lesser figure at school than might have been expected from his confident talk. Tom was indubitably popular with masters and boys alike, and there was no mistaking the warmth of the welcome extended to his spouse. Nor was it even in the lowly position of wives in an institution dedicated to the proposition that the female of the species was at best a nonentity, at worst a dangerous threat, in the educational process of the young male.

    No, Natica, having made the initial discovery of her own insignificance, soon made a second: that this insignificance was shared by all. Or all but one. The headmaster was everything at Averhill. The Reverend Rufus Lockwood had come there four decades before, at a time when the school was smaller and poorer, not only in endowment but in qualified teachers, and he had brought to the solution of its problems an ambition as great and a mind as tough as his birth had been humble and his looks unprepossessing. He had managed to persuade a desperate but prescient chairman of the trustees to