The Young Apollo and Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

lovable and pleasantly subject to female wheedling. How else was one to handle him? And handled he had often to be.
    There were males, of course, in Camilla's and Marielle's lives: the youths of the neighborhood, if they got through the girls' mothers' social sieves, for the most part wellbehaved, sometimes shy, even inarticulate, sometimes impertinent, sometimes almost coarse, always well dressed, at least at subscription dances, at times handsome, at times winsome, at times simply disgusting. There were flirtations, even kisses, but at least in Camilla's case, there was nothing really serious until her sophomore year at Barnard College, in 1919.
    There had been a minor family issue over her going to college at all. Her mother, something of a reader of good books herself, had not been strongly opposed to it, and the end of the Great War had ushered in an era that was already showing signs of drastically changing the status of women, but the Townsend clan as a whole did not yet see the university as a necessary part of a woman's education. Did Camilla really want to be a bluestocking? But when Camilla, scenting a new independence in the air, found the courage to insist, objections were withdrawn, though on the condition that she should choose a college where she could still live at home. So she chose Barnard.
    She had hoped that Marielle would go with her, but Marielle was now engaged to Pedro Blagden and already embarked on the career of preparing herself to share the life of a rich sportsman. Pedro had made one silly crack about her and Camilla training for an all-girls football team, at which his fiancée had promptly dropped all idea of further education. Camilla had rather pitied her for abandoning so easily the road to a higher culture and had entered enthusiastically into academic life, making several new friends among young women of backgrounds very dissimilar to her own. Indeed, she did well enough to be given a bid to the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma and was not in the least put off when Pedro, now married to Marielle, referred to it laughingly as "Wrapper, Wrapper, Pajama." It was so like him!
    But a major crisis arose at home when it materialized that the night of her initiation coincided with that of an aunt's dinner party which she had agreed to attend. She protested to her mother that she would have to back out, that Aunt Maud would surely understand, but Eva Townsend was unexpectedly rigid.
    "It happens to be an important party: your cousin Willy's twenty-first birthday. But in any event, when one accepts a dinner invitation, one goes. Or sends one's coffin."
    Her father, appealed to, of course backed her mother, as he always did in any social question, and Camilla had tearfully to explain to her sorority sisters that she would have to be initiated in absentia. At the party she found herself seated next to David Hunter, whom she was meeting for the first time. As her mother who, like many New York matrons of her group, had at first been much taken with this handsome young man, commented, "It goes to show that it pays to stick by the old rules."
    David Hunter, at twenty-two, was certainly gifted with looks. Just before he had been sent overseas as a second lieutenant, his adoring mother, desperate at the idea that she might never see him again, had sent him up to Boston to sit for a charcoal sketch by the great John Sargent, so that she would at least have a perfect likeness to console her in the event of disaster. The master had done a wonderful job, and reproductions of his drawing of the curly-headed, wide-eyed, noble-browed, square-chinned youth had been used on enlistment posters as the epitome of the young American fighting spirit. David, on the distaff side, was the great-grandson of a giant railroad tycoon, but the tycoon's children and grandchildren, famous for their flamboyant expenditure, had depleted his great fortune to a small fraction of its one-time glory, and this romantic-looking scion had been