The Young Apollo and Other Stories Read Free Page B

in Washington the chance they had been waiting for to destroy Wall Street in the public eye! Your friends don't feel anything like that, I take it?"
    "Good lord, no!" Genevieve's laugh was perfectly good-natured. "You're talking about another era, auntie. Let's call it the Iron Age. No, the attitude of our friends might be described as 'There but for the grace of God go I!'"
    "I see." What more was there for Camilla to say? She listened and let Genevieve rattle on about how best and how often to arrange for the children to visit their father, and took her leave as soon as seemed decent.
    But she didn't go straight home. She was too upset. She had to talk to someone about the shock of this new experience, and who was there better than her oldest and dearest friend of the heart, Marielle Blagden, fellow widow, whose apartment hotel was only a few blocks south of Genevieve's dwelling? She turned her steps thither.
    Marielle, after her husband's death, ignoring the concerned protests of her family and friends, had divided the bulk of his large estate, bequeathed to her outright, among their two sons, reserving just enough to maintain herself comfortably in two rooms. But the building she had chosen was a first-class one, and the two rooms were handsome and properly furnished with fine things from the big Blagden Georgian house in Long Island, so Marielle was not, as she had wisely planned not to be, to any degree an object of pity. "I am doing exactly what I want," she had answered all objections firmly, "and living exactly as I choose. Call it selfish, if you like. Indeed, I'd rather have you call it selfish."
    But Camilla knew that her friend had always lived for Pedro, as Peter Blagden was affectionately known, and had adapted herself totally to the hunting and polo-playing tastes of that kindly, charming, but unimaginative sportsman, and had, losing him, adapted herself in turn to the needs of their two kindly, charming, but unimaginative sons, whose wives needed the money that their husbands were too busy hunting and polo-playing to earn.
    Camilla thought, as Marielle opened the door, how marvelously preserved she was—tall, slim, elegant, with large, smiling brown eyes under a fine pale brow and sleek undyed black hair still only faintly lined with gray. And she seemed to sense at once that Camilla was troubled. She listened in grave silence as the latter described her interview with Genevieve and then rose to mix her a cocktail at a small bar table.
    "I think you may need this," she said, handing Camilla a glass. "Let us drink to the new age we're living in."
    "Must we like it?"
    "Of course not. We must only accept it. For as long as it lasts. Ages don't last forever. This one, however, can be counted on to last our time. Yours and mine, I mean."
    "What have I just told you that makes you think I don't accept it?"
    "Your clinging to a bygone moral code."
    "You mean that all these stock market shenanigans are no longer crimes?"
    "No, they're still crimes. What has changed is the public attitude toward them."
    "People approve of them now, you mean?"
    "That's putting it rather strongly. But they recognize how widespread they are. How many others are involved who never get caught. So they don't judge too harshly. It might be
them
tomorrow."
    "Yet people still go to jail for these crimes."
    "Oh, yes. There have to be rules in any game. For that's what the stock market has become: a game. If you're caught inside trading or gambling with other people's money or making illegal investments, you're docked so many points, so to speak. But nobody thinks any the worse of you."
    "So when you get out of prison, you take back your old place in society? Nobody snubs you anymore."
    "Just so."
    "And you approve of all that, Marielle?"
    "Did I say that? You and I were brought up in a different school, Millie. There was a code that applied to everyone. The men downtown were supposed to be strictly honorable in their financial affairs. And