The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Read Online Free Page A

you’ve been to the house.”
    He shrugged his shoulders. “Lawyers are busy men, Maud,” he said. “We can’t get off every night. Besides, I’m shy.”
    She was not to be appeased so lightly. “You didn’t come to see me, anyway,” she retorted. “You came because Daddy begged you to.” She smiled sourly. “He probably went down on his knees.”
    â€œNothing of the sort,” he said coolly. “If you must know, I came because I heard we were going to
Roll Out the Barrel
.”
    Maud stared at him for a second and then burst out laughing. “Then you’re in for a sad disappointment, Mr. Nicholas,” she said, “because Daddy couldn’t get seats. We’re going to
Doubles or Quits
. I do hope you haven’t seen it.”
    He covered his face with his napkin. “But I have,” he groaned. “Twice!”
    Maud, of course, did not know it, but Halsted Nicholas was the partner who, more than any other, held the clients of Spreddon & Spreddon. Mr. Spreddon increasingly accepted positions of public trust; he was now president of a museum, a hospital, and a zoo, all the biggest of their kind; he represented to his partners that this sort of thing, although unremunerative and time-consuming, “paid dividends in the long run.” If anyone grumbled, it was not Halsted, whose industry was prodigious. What drove him so hard nobody knew. He never showed ambition of the ordinary sort, as, for example, wanting his name at the top of the firm letterhead or asking for paneling in his office. He felt, it was true, the deepest gratitude to Mr. Spreddon and to his late father, the Judge, who had seen promise in him and who had sent him to college and law school, but this he had already repaid a hundredfold. He loved the law, it was true, but he was already one of the ablest trial lawyers in the city and could certainly have held his position without quite so liberal an expenditure of energy. No, if Halsted was industrious it was probably by habit. He may have lacked the courage to stop and look into himself. He was a man who had met and undertaken many responsibilities; he had supported his friends with advice and his parents with money; he was considered to be—and, indeed, he was—an admirable character, unspoiled even by a Manhattan success; but whatever part of himself he revealed, it was a public part. His private self was unshared.
    He left the theater that night after the second act to go down to his office and work on a brief, but the following Sunday he called at the Spreddons’ and took Maud for a walk around the reservoir. A week later he invited her to come to Wall Street to dine with him, on the excuse that he had to work after dinner and could not get uptown, and after she had done this, which he said no other girl would have done, even for Clark Gable, he became a steady caller at the Spreddons’. Maud found herself in the unprecedented situation of having a beau.
    He was not a very ceremonious beau; he never sent her flowers or whispered silly things in her ear, and not infrequently, at the very last moment, when they had planned an evening at the theater or the opera, he would call up to say that he couldn’t get away from the office. Maud, however, saw nothing unusual in this. What mattered to her was that he expected so little. He never pried into her past or demanded her agreement or enthusiasm over anything; he never asked her to meet groups of his friends or to go to crowded night clubs. He never, furthermore, offered the slightest criticism of her way of living or made suggestions as to how she might enlarge its scope. He took her entirely for granted and would, without any semblance of apology, talk for an entire evening about his own life and struggles and the wonderful things that he had done in court. She was a slow talker, and he a fast one; it was easier for both if he held forth alone on the