The Young Apollo and Other Stories Read Online Free

their wives were supposed to give them moral support. Mr. Coolidge said that the business of America was business, and we were meant to uphold high standards. Wall Street was to set an example to the nation."
    "Exactly! I remember that Mr. Morgan said he would never do business except with men on whose word he could entirely rely."
    "Of course, the men on whom he relied may not have dared to give him one on which he couldn't."
    Camilla began to sense that her friend might not be quite with her. It irritated her, because Marielle's Pedro, the heir to a considerable fortune, had never so much as poked his nose south of Canal Street. He and Marielle had lived isolated and protected lives. "Are you implying, my dear, that our parents' generation were hypocrites?" she asked.
    "Well, there's always some of that quality around, is there not?"
    "If it existed among us women, I never ran into it. We believed in our men, you and I! We lived for them. We thought it was our role in life to do so. Of course, you were not challenged. I was. I believed in a man who was weak. But I still had to live for him. As you did for Pedro."
    "What do you mean,
had
to? Wasn't it a choice? I didn't
have
to do anything."
    "Of course you did! It was the way we were brought up." Camilla knew that her rising exasperation was liable to take her too far, but she went on. There is nothing as sharp as the irritation that one's nearest and dearest arouse when they do arouse it. "You deliberately squashed every artistic and literary taste you had in order not to embarrass in the smallest degree Pedro and his philistine friends!"
    Marielle only smiled. "That's perfectly true."
    "You even used to say, when you stole away to a concert or lecture, that you'd been 'naughty.'"
    "I plead guilty."
    "You mutilated yourself for a man! As I did!"
    "And do you know something? Pedro didn't give a damn. I mean about whether or not I shared his obsession with sport. He was perfectly happy doing his own thing. His confidence in himself was unbounded. If I'd gone in for poetry or painting, no matter how extreme, he wouldn't have minded in the least. If I'd become as famous as Edna St. Vincent Millay, he'd have boasted about it in the locker room of the Racquet Club. 'You know, fellas, my Marielle has just won a Pulitzer. Isn't that great? How many of you are married to geniuses?' And then he'd have gone happily up to his court tennis game."
    "So it was all for nothing."
    "Not quite. For it made
me
happy. Doing what I thought would make him happy."
    "And all the work I did to rehabilitate David was unnecessary? Does that follow? That he never needed rehabilitation?"
    "Perhaps not as much as you thought. But what difference does that make? You were happy doing it."
    "No, Marielle, I wasn't." Camilla shook her head somberly. "I wasn't at all. Perhaps it was all in the men we chose. You chose well. I less so. We were victims of our time."
    "We were victims of ourselves."
    "I don't think I can bear that. Anyway, I'm going home."
    ***
    Camilla did a lot of thinking that night. It seemed to her that from childhood she had seen the world about her through two very different eyes. One saw the myriad chocolate streets where a large clan of parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins dwelled in rather noisy conformity, where husbands ruled from a moneyed "downtown" and wives ruled the uptown expenditure, where marriages were either happy or never spoken of, and where children were granted considerable liberty so long as they seemed headed ultimately to a repetition of the parental careers. But the other eye embraced a world of fantasy where one grew up to be Geraldine Farrar singing Tosca, or Maud Adams playing Peter Pan, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning composing a sonnet to the Portuguese. The second vision was the one that she shared with Marielle Loomis, who lived just across East Forty-ninth Street in a house with a Beaux Arts facade that marked her family as richer, though not unbridgeably so,