The Lady of Situations by Louis Auchincloss

Author:Louis Auchincloss [Auchincloss, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780395544112
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 1990-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

13

AFTER THE reading at Mrs. Knight's Natica became a near obsession to Stephen. Between classes, at his desk, his mind would wander from the text he was preparing for assignment to recapture the sharp quick step with which she entered the dining hall and the open friendly smile she would toss in his direction as she passed his table. In chapel he would look for her and wonder irritably what she was doing if she wasn't there. And soon his fantasies were taking a bolder turn. He imagined her joining him in the throng after a Sunday service, suddenly clutching his arm to draw him aside and whisper miserably that she couldn't stay with Tommy another day. She had fallen in love with him, hopelessly in love with him, and she had to tell him that very minute! At night in bed he would toss and turn with lustful thoughts.

She seemed now the sole female element in a world of unrelieved maleness. It was as if she had sprung from the middle of the green campus, like Botticelli's Venus from the sea, thrusting into the shadows of the surrounding buildings stray members of the cruder sex and withered examples of her own. She had come to incarnate all the romance he had once so strongly sensed in the school; without her the masters and their wives, like the gods and goddesses of Valhalla after the abduction of Freia, became old and gray.

There were brief, angry periods when he would try to shake himself out of his preoccupation. Venus from the sea? That busy trim little creature in tweeds who cast so bleak a golden stare at the foibles of Averhill? Who had married a bumbling curate to get away from parents she despised, very likely for no better reason than snobbishness? And who probably, in any case, was a cold fish? Perhaps it was indeed time, as his mother was always suggesting in her letters, that he should be cultivating the families in the Averhill neighborhood with marriageable daughters. There was even a country club that had already indicated that young bachelor masters would be pushed ahead on the waiting list of potential members. Might not the persistent image of Natica be the simple product of his own repression?

He had become almost intimate with one of his dormitory prefects. Giles Woodward, that small sharp weasel of a boy, brightest and most impudent of the sixth form, he had won to his side by the simple expedient of asking him to act as his "executive officer" in maintaining discipline. From a sarcastic but never openly insubordinate critic Giles had overnight become his warmest supporter, and he often now sat up late at night in Stephen's study, reading while the master read or wrote, but always ready for a chat when the latter wished.

It was thus that he happened to be present one night when Stephen was talking on the telephone with his mother.

"I trust my beautiful boy is behaving himself." Angelica's bantering tone rarely implied sarcasm.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.