The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Read Online Free

her otherwise unruffled existence.
    ***
    At one of these dinners, she found Halsted Nicholas seated on her right. She remembered him from earlier days when he had spent a summer with them as her brothers’ tutor, and her memories of that summer were pleasanter than most. He was, of course, no longer a boy, being close to thirty-five, and a junior partner now of her father’s; but his face had lost none of the sensitivity and charm, none of the uncompromising youth that she dimly remembered. He seemed an odd combination of ease and tension; one could tell that his reserve and even his air of gentle timidity were the product of manners; for when he spoke, it was with a certain roughness that indicated assurance. This was reinforced by the intent stare with which he fastened his very round and dark eyes on his plate and the manner in which his black eyebrows seemed to ripple with his thick black hair. She would have liked to talk to him, but that, of course, was not her way, and she watched him carefully as he crumbled his roll on the thick white tablecloth.
    â€œYou’ve certainly been taking your own sweet time to grow up, Maud,” he said in a familiar tone, breaking a cracker into several pieces and dropping them into his soup as Maud had been taught never to do. “This makes it six years that I’ve been waiting for you.”
    â€œSix years?” she repeated in surprise.
    He nodded, looking at her gravely. “Six years,” he said. “Ever since that wonderful Christmas Eve when you told the assembled Spreddon family to put on their best bib and tucker and jump in the lake.”
    Maud turned pale. Even the heavy silver service on the long table seemed to be jumping back and forth. She put down her spoon. “So you know that,” she said in a low voice. “They talk about it. They tell strangers.”
    He laughed his loud, easy laugh. “I’m hardly a stranger, Maud,” he said. “I’ve been working as a lawyer in your father’s office for twelve years and before that I was there as an office boy. And you’re wrong about their telling people, too. They didn’t have to tell me. I was there.”
    She gasped. “You couldn’t have been,” she protested. “I remember it so well.” She paused. “But why are you saying this, anyway? What’s the point?”
    Again he laughed. “You don’t believe me,” he said. “But it’s so simple. It was Christmas Eve and I was all alone in town, and your old man, who, in case you don’t know it, is one prince of a guy, took pity on me and asked me up. I told him I’d come in a Santa Claus get-up and surprise you kids. Anyway I was right in here, in this very dining room, sticking my beard on and peering through the crack in those double doors to watch for my cue from your father when—bingo!—you pulled that scene. Right there before my eyes and ears! Oh, Maud! You were terrific!”
    Even with his eyes, his sure but friendly eyes, upon her as he said all this, it was as if it were Christmas again, Christmas with every stocking crammed and to be emptied, item by item, before the shining and expectant parental faces. Maud felt her stomach muscles suddenly tighten in anguished humiliation. She put her napkin on the table and looked desperately about her.
    â€œNow Maud,” he said, putting his firm hand on hers. “Take it easy.”
    â€œLeave me alone,” she said in a rough whisper. “Leave me be.”
    â€œYou’re not going to be angry with me?” he protested. “After all these years? All these years that I’ve been waiting for the little girl with the big temper to grow up? Maud, how unkind.”
    She gave him a swift look. “I’ve been back home and grown up for several months,” she pointed out ungraciously. “If you know Father so well, you must have known that. And this is the first time