The Embezzler Read Online Free Page B

The Embezzler
Book: The Embezzler Read Online Free
Author: Louis Auchincloss
Tags: General Fiction
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the bar. Sometimes, when I look at you and think that here's the man who's actually going to take away my Evadne, I have a kind of shock. But don't worry. I'll come around. God bless you, my boy."
    I talked with the men at the bar, but I could talk to them and think of the other thing. I could talk to them and speculate that I might at last be losing my mind. Three hundred and fifty thousand! My stock of Georgia Phosphates, the principal security for my loan, had been dropping badly all winter, and I had been tossing everything I could lay my hands on, including some of the America City bonds, on the pile at de Grasse to prevent a sale, but I had not dreamed that it had reached even a fraction of such a total. If what George said were true—and could one doubt it?—more than half the Club's bonds were hypothecated for my loan.
    "Coming to lunch, Guy? It's nearly two."
    "No, go ahead, fellows. I'll join you later."
    I would go to Karl Vender in the morning. He would give me the money quickly enough. But I would have to watch myself in the future. I was alone now in the bar, for Pierre had gone to the pantry, and I surveyed the desolate pink face that loomed over the sport coat in the mirror facing me. Was
that
Guy Prime? That scared rabbit? That fat phony? Slowly, carefully, almost solemnly, I raised my empty glass until it was high above my head and then hurled it with all my force at that fatuously staring image. The shocking smash brought instant ease to my troubled soul as it brought Pierre, unblinking, back to the bar.
    "There's been an accident, Pierre," I said impassively. "I seem to have broken my glass."
    "Yes, sir. Shall I fix you another drink, Mr. Prime?"
    "No, that will be quite enough. I'm going in to lunch now."
    If the rest of the world would only be as sensible as Pierre, I reflected, I might still come out all right. But Pierre was part of the club I had created. I had not created the world that I faced each Monday.

3.
    W HAT WAS the background? Well, what is a family? Is it anything more, as I have already suggested, than the predominance of male issue over female? We speak of families "dying out," simply because the direct male line from father to son has been snapped. The hundreds of descendants of Lewis Prime, who came from Liverpool to New York in 1740 to establish an auction business, include some of the most distinguished merchants and lawyers of Manhattan's history, but few of them were Primes. All of our renown, such as it is, rests on the simple fact that my grandfather, the Reverend Chauncey Prime, Rector of Trinity Church and later Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, had seven sons who made almost as many famous matches.
Puck's Weekly
in 1881 ran a cartoon that showed railroad and steel magnates desperately piling up their bags of gold before a group of tall, indolent, blond young men in sports clothes, with tennis rackets under their arms, who barely condescend to glance at the bait thrust under their languid eyes. It was entitled: "What Your Money Will Buy, or The Quest of the Primes." A decade later, in the 'nineties, the same bait was sent over the Atlantic in search of coronets, but by that time my uncles were all comfortably settled.
    How did they do it? What did they have? Certainly not brains, nor business acumen, nor imagination, nor wit, nor even great looks. They were tall, slim and very straight, and had long, rather wooden, oblong faces that bore age well. Their resemblance to each other, which was of great assistance to the younger ones, was almost comic, for the father of an heiress, seeing that his neighbor in Newport had done well with one Prime, was pleased to find another available. The new rich always copy each other, and once the Prime fashion had started my uncles had only to bow to it. They had only, in short, to believe in themselves and in the world that constituted their immediate environment.
    That may have been the answer, that they never questioned

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