The Scarlet Letters Read Online Free Page A

corporation law firms of our city. I have had the occasion to testify for them in a number of cases. They do fine work."
    "But I'm afraid, sir, I've been rather remiss in my family duties. I have seen my uncle only at Christmas or birthday gatherings. And I'm afraid he may have formed an unfavorable opinion of me when I dropped out of Chelton."
    "Pish tush, that water's long under the bridge. You'll find he'll take a very different view of you when he hears
my
recommendation. And that he is certainly going to have!"

2
    U NCLE CHARLEY HAD MANY of the de Peyster characteristics: he was grave of demeanor, deeply conservative in his attitudes—domestic, political and economic—darkly and faultlessly dressed, dignified in bearing, measured of speech. But he differed drastically from his sister Fanny in that he cut a figure of considerable importance in the social and business worlds and cared about cutting such a figure. For all his disdain of an increasingly multiracial and multicultural New York and what he considered its vulgar innovations, for all his reluctance to associate with Irish Catholics or Jews, he studied the changes in his world with care and caution and learned precisely what compromises were required for a successful navigator of such turbulent water and just when hoisting the de Peyster flag could be a signal of triumph and when dipping it could be a judicious surrender. His mind and legal abilities, though keen enough, were not of the high caliber to have brought him by themselves to eminence at the bar, but when added to his impressive appearance, his high social connections and his smooth assurance of attracting major clients, the combination carried him to the senior partnership in Dallas, Kaye & de Peyster that he had never doubted would one day be his. Majestic but gracious, he inspired in the roughest of rough diamonds among the firm's large and variegated clientele something like the awe which a Spanish conquistador might have instilled in a native Aztec or Inca.
    He understood at once the value of Professor Gregg's recommendation of his nephew; it confirmed an unspoken suspicion on his part that his sister was too self-centered to have any true comprehension of an even mildly rebellious child. He had heard her complaints about Ambrose's "atheism" with the same cool but neutral silence of a Medici cardinal hearing of the indictment of a Galileo. He would only interfere when it paid him to interfere, and this happened when he hired Ambrose on his own account, the other available openings in his firm having been filled by graduates of Harvard Law School, the institution then almost exclusively favored by his partners. Years later this decision, like most that Charles de Peyster made, redounded to his own benefit, for when he aged and began to fail, it was his rising relative who went to bat for him and saved his unduly swollen percentage of profits earned by younger men from being reduced by a hungry partnership.
    At first under his uncle's guidance but rapidly on his own merits Ambrose's rise in the firm was steady and seemingly ineluctable. He not only loved his work, he devoured it, putting in hours that surprised even the most industrious of an already industrious organization. He attacked the thorniest of great corporation problems with a kind of fierce delight, and in his admiration of power and his excitement at implementing it he lost almost every tinge of his youthful economic liberalism. He turned his reforming energy instead to studying the composition and administration of the firm that was to be the tool of his creative thinking and made plans in his head for its better development if he should ever find himself in charge. He would concentrate, for example, on improving its esprit de corps. No lawyer would ever be hired either as a partner or clerk collaterally: every ultimate member of the firm would start as an associate right out of law school, secure in the knowledge that his only