The Young Apollo and Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

than Camilla's family, the Townsends, in their brownstone residence somewhat "gussied up" with supposedly Egyptian trimmings.
    Camilla and Marielle always sat together, at least whenever it was allowed, in classes at Miss Chapin's School for Girls and reveled in the English poets of the recently ended Victorian era, in Tennyson and Browning, and, more adventurously, in Byron and Shelley. They loved the haunting music of Debussy and Saint-Saens, and they particularly delighted in the new operas of Puccini when they went to matinees at the Metropolitan in Marielle's grandmother's box. They were daring enough to tell their parents that they favored votes for women and might even have joined a suffragette parade had not Camilla's mother, Eva Townsend, suddenly frowned, shook her head sternly, and told them, "Of course, you must realize that is quite out of the question."
    But Camilla still liked to think that her Christian name was derived from the Camille of Corneille's tragedy
Horace,
though in fact it stemmed from a sweet and saintly grandmother who had had little enough in common with the fiery Roman virgin who paid with her life for cursing her fatherland over the war in which her betrothed had been killed. Camilla, in certain moments, had liked to imagine herself as endowed with the guts to stand up against a family united in defense of all the old ways and proclaim her independence. She and Marielle even had the nerve, once, at least, to discuss the possibility of a future in which they wouldn't marry at all but would share a little house full of lovely things and live for the arts, calling themselves a couple of
exquises.
    But whatever fantasies they allowed themselves, they could never get away from the nagging suspicion that what Camilla had called her first vision of their world was the true one and that there would be no way of escaping their destiny to become wives and mothers. That there were such things as old maids in society was sufficiently obvious to them, but these fell into two categories, both unthinkable, one beyond their material means, even Marielle's, and the other too low to be borne. The first category contained the rich old virgins of New York and Newport, a strictly American phenomenon, as in Europe they would have been married off no matter what their disqualifications or reluctance. These included Miss Anne Morgan, Miss Annie Jennings, Miss Julia Berwind, Miss Ruth Twombly, and the Misses Wetmore, grandes dames who commanded wide reverence and respect. The second was the sorry residue of those too poor or too plain to catch a spouse, who were left to struggle for a living as teachers or paid companions or to haunt the upper stories of the houses of aged parents and dine on trays in their bedrooms whenever an extra man had dropped out of a dinner party below upsetting his hostess's
placement.
    That the ultimate power rested with men was the
donnée
of a woman's existence. It was dogma, having little to do with any innate superiority. Eva Townsend, in her daughter's eyes, was an abler, stronger, more practical, and more decisive person than her gentle, easygoing father, and nor had Eva herself ever been in the least unaware of this. She and her sisters and sisters-in-law had taken firm control of the areas of life allowed them by the other sex: the household, the costs, the schools, the summer resorts, and the makeup of society itself—who was in it, who out. But in the final court of appeal, where life or death was at stake, the male alone voted.
    One could, however, always laugh at men. Camilla recognized that her mother and aunts liked to chuckle over men's foibles: their tippling, their falling asleep after dinner, their obsession with spectator sports, their bawdry, and their passionate anger at anyone who suggested the mildest control of free enterprise. But the myth had nonetheless to be maintained that the head of the family was fundamentally benign, an "old darling" at heart, gruff but