Empire Read Free Page A

luck insisted on having it, the eldest son had been at Yale with Caroline’s half-brother, Blaise Delacroix Sanford; and Caroline had met young Mr. Hay twice in New Haven and once in Paris; and now they were houseguests in Kent, contemplating the question she had allowed herself to ask, quite unaware that she was literally speaking her mind, something not encouraged outside the bluestocking academy of the grand Mlle. Souvestre: “Will Blaise try to take all my money now that he’s sunk the
Maine
?”
    Caroline did her best to pretend that she had been joking—about the money if not the
Maine;
and so she managed to convince Del that she was not joking. He shut his eyes a moment. Two tiny lines formed a sort of steeple between his brows, filial imitation of the Ambassador’s deep lines. “Blaise is very—fierce,” said Del. The peacock shouted harsh agreement beneath them. “But he is also a gentleman.” Del opened his eyes: the matter was, for him, satisfactorily resolved.
    “You mean he went to Yale?” Caroline had a truly French distaste for the Anglo-American word—not to mention romantic concept—“gentleman.”
    “Of course, he didn’t graduate. But even so …”
    “He is half a gentleman. And, of course, he’s only half my brother. I wish I were a man. A man,” Caroline repeated, “
not
a gentleman.”
    “But you would be both. Anyway, why be either?” Del sat on a bench carved from dull local stone. Caroline arranged herself, at an angle, beside him. How pleased, she thought, Sanfords and Hays would be to see so inevitable a young couple merging like fragments of mercury into the silvery whole of marriage. Del would one day be as huge—no other word—as his mother, Clara. But then Caroline knew that she could very well become as huge as the Colonel, who, at the end, gave up going to the theater because he could no longer fit in any seat, and refused to arrange for a special chair to be placed in a box as his one-time friend the even more enormous Prince of Wales did.
    “We could be fat together,” murmured Caroline, wondering if she had revealed herself in a
murmured
aside about Blaise, or had the voice been normal? Normal, she decided, when the puzzled Del asked her torepeat herself. She asked, “What is your impression of his character?”
    “I don’t know any more. I haven’t seen him since he quit Yale and went to work for the
Morning Journal
.”
    “Even so, you were his classmate. You know him better than I do. I’m just the half-sister, back home in France. You’re the—contemporary in America.”
    “I think Blaise wanted to get his life started earlier than most of us do. That’s all. He was—he is—in a hurry.”
    “To do what?” Caroline was genuinely curious about her brother.
    “To live it all, I suppose.”
    “And you’re not?”
    Del smiled; the teeth were like a child’s first set, small irregular pearls; he also had dimples and a turned-up nose. “I’m lazy. Like my father says
he
is, but isn’t. I don’t know what I shall do with myself. But Blaise knows just what he wants.”
    Caroline was surprised. “Last year he wanted to study law. Then he quit Yale and went to work for a newspaper, of all things. And what a newspaper!” Caroline had yet to hear anything good of the
Journal
or its proprietor, the wealthy young Californian William Randolph Hearst, whose mother had recently inherited a fortune from his near-illiterate father, Senator George Hearst, a crude discoverer of gold and silver mines in the West. It was the Senator who had set up his cherished only son as a newspaper proprietor, first with the
Daily Examiner
in San Francisco and then with the
Morning Journal
in New York, where young Hearst had spectacularly succeeded, through a form of sensational journalism known as “yellow” (fires, alarums, scandals), in surpassing Mr. Pulitzer’s original “yellow”
New York World
. The
Journal
was now, in its own words, “the most popular