The Headmaster's Dilemma Read Free Page B

of course, was common in the world of ballet and hardly to be commented on. But what Ione was coldly observing from across the room was not the dancer but her father. He was totally taken with his guest; Ione and her mother for the moment had ceased to exist.
    He did, however, find the time to discuss with his daughter at breakfast the next morning her desire to go to law school, but she could not but compare the seemingly perfunctory speed at which he approved her plan with the rapt attention he had given to Adla's problem the night before. Still, his assent and support served to quell her mother's doubts, and Ione found herself enrolled the following fall in New York University Law School, and deriving even greater satisfaction from her courses than she had anticipated. She particularly liked contracts, where she sat by and soon made something of a pal of a sandy, tousled, and tense young man called Tom Murphy who was a deeply devoted student and obviously the type destined to make the law review. He came of a very different background from Ione's—his father was a police detective—but he responded to her friendly overtures and was soon helping her to analyze difficult cases. After a few weeks she got up the courage to ask him for a weekend at her family's villa in Rye, and to her surprise he not only accepted but easily fitted into a household more elegant, presumably, than any he had previously encountered. He brought his law books with him; they must have been the only things that really impressed him.
    Ira and Diane were charming to him, of course, but Ione could see that he bored them, however little they showed it. Unexpectedly she found herself sharply resenting this. Alone with her mother on Sunday night after Tom had returned to town, she suddenly challenged her.
    "You were bored stiff with poor Tom, weren't you?"
    "Dear me, did I show it?"
    "Only to me, of course. Never to anyone else. But it troubles me that you don't see anything in a man like that. He's good and true, and he's going to be a first-rate lawyer. Maybe even a great one. And you don't give a damn. Any more than Dad does." She felt an odd wave of relief as her tone waxed almost strident. "You both only care about how things look. And I care about what they
are
. That's the difference between us!"
    "My dear child, what has that young man's goodness and truth and legal aptitude to do with me or your father?" Diane's tone manifested pure reasonableness; she offered no acknowledgment of her daughter's rising temper. "We wish him well, of course, very well. But his virtues are hardly my affair. He doesn't interest me. Except, of course, as a possible husband for my dearly loved daughter. Mothers always see any young man their daughter brings home in that light. We can't help it."
    "Well, you can cross Tom off that list. He's not my affair. We work together, that's all. He won't marry until he's a junior partner in some big firm, and then it will be to Miss Mouse. But if I were to take him seriously as a beau, how would you feel about it?"
    "We needn't go into that, need we?"
    "I'd like to know your criteria."
    Diane paused. When she spoke it was after her evident decision that perhaps her daughter
did
need some guidance. "Well, it's my belief that if one has only one life, it better not be spent being bored. The girl who marries your Tom will probably have a kind and faithful husband. But unless she's devoid of imagination she will, after the first thrill of sexual union has passed, have to come to grips with a lifetime of ennui. If she's as hipped on the law as he is, that may be a way out for her."
    Ione realized at this with a sudden shock that what her mother was implying was perfectly true: no daughter of hers would ever dream of marrying a man as devoid of humor and imagination as the honest and industrious, the all-deserving Tom. But did that have to mean that she had become a captive of the maternal philosophy, if philosophy it could be