The Young Apollo and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss

Cousin Kate, why I have not called on you before."
    "When I start wondering, my dear, you may say I'm wandering."
    "And why," she pursued, ignoring my comment, "Beverly has not consulted you on your end-of-season ball."
    "There's plenty of time for that. And I'm not even sure I'm going to give one."
    "That's just as well, then. For my husband says he's not going to have any part in it. He says that the time for the kind of party you and he gave is past. That the job of breaking up the old ways has been done, and it's now up to him to create a more serious and stable society."
    "Fancy! And one, I take it, in which I'm to have no part? The old nag is turned out to pasture?"
    "Well, he didn't put it quite so crudely."
    "Adelaide," I said severely, "you came here to say something even more disagreeable than that. Well, say it!"
    I was interested at last. The woman, for once, was almost interesting. She had some spirit, or at least spite, in her, after all.
    "It's this, then. You sacrificed me to a man you thought was your protégé. Your property. Well, now he's going to sacrifice you for me! He's going to make
me
the Mrs. Kate Rives of Newport!"
    "Well, well!" I let my novel drop to the ground. "This beats fiction any day. How have I sacrificed you? To what strange deity have I offered so untempting a morsel?"
    "To the god of your own pleasure!" Adelaide's face had turned a bright pink. "You knew what awaited me. Do you want to hear what happened on my wedding night?"
    "Avidly."
    "I'm sure you do. It was all that your jaded, decadent curiosity could have asked. My husband of a few hours made it very clear to me that he had no interest in me physically, that he offered me instead what he termed a 'congenial partnership' which would take us both to the top of the social ladder."
    "Wasn't that more or less what you might have expected? Wasn't it what Newport rather took for granted?"
    "I expected the partnership, yes, but I expected more. Because you had assured me there would be more. That I was marrying a man! And you
knew
he wasn't! You knew all about him!"
    "What makes you think that?"
    "Because you reek of such things! Do you deny it?"
    I paused a moment. "No," I said at last. "Because any way you take him, he's good enough for you. You were nobody, and now you'll be somebody. Unless you're a complete fool, you'll learn to enjoy it."
    "I'm going to try, anyway. And half my fun will be knowing that I'm undoing half the stupid things you made Beverly do."
    "Oh, get out of here. I want to read my book."
    By the time I had picked it up, she was gone. I had little compunction about her. No, my disgust was all with myself, for having so long put up with such a little rat as Beverly Dean, whose only ambition had been to replace Mrs. Astor with me and me with himself. Of course, he had no loyalties; the women he betrayed were only fantasies of himself. I had no doubt that he pictured himself, in his mind's eye, as a despotic hostess, dazzling in diamonds and ruling a world turned court. Adelaide would be his bank, not his hostess. And he would never leave her, as he would never find a richer or more compliant wife. He would grow fat and shrill, autocratic and occasionally obscene, with bigger and bigger jeweled cufflinks and studs, and when the social world ultimately tired of him, as they tired of every new favorite, he would become bitter and misanthropic, and Adelaide would have her ultimate revenge by supporting him in his lonely luxury and ignoring his sour complaints.
    That night, at home, I was glad when my husband arrived for one of his rare Newport weekends. He listened politely, over a bottle of the finest Burgundy, while I voiced my grim little tale.
    "Well, my dear, you have had the dubious privilege of presiding over the decline and fall of Newport society. But do not think you can be a Gibbon. If its golden age was a fiction, so will be its twilight. It really is hardly worth recording."
    "But couldn't you say that of