Diary of a Yuppie by Louis Auchincloss Page A

guarantee us a four hundred thousand dollar start."
    "Very well, I'll pledge it. Just as you say. And who knows? I might even pay it."
    I looked now with admiration at the cool Mrs. Sands. Her blonde hair was perfectly set. Everything about her was prepared, manicured, scrupulously shining and neat. Yet she could hardly have been a woman with hours to spend at her dressing table. She had to be as efficient in her toilet as in her business. Her regular features, her calm gray eyes, her air of stillness, enhanced my original sense of her almost movie-star loveliness, yet on closer inspection I could see that she was the least bit dry, a too typical American blonde. And then, as she continued to outline her fund-raising plans, the seriousness, even the gravity, of her nature, corrected once more my misimpression. She seemed to be trying to look like what she felt the well-dressed career woman as pictured in
Vogue
or
Harper's Bazaar
had to look like. Yet she was probably too smart to believe that she had wholly succeeded or perhaps even to care. As I watched her look up from her notes at each man as he questioned her, I took in her air of total attention, which, nonetheless—and without suggesting the least failure of good manners—did not even attempt to conceal that it was a business mask.
    "That is right, Mr. Seldon. We have to have a membership drive as well. Of course, we will not expect much revenue from that. We can't charge more than fifteen or twenty dollars a year, and a good sixty per cent will not renew. But the foundations believe in membership drives. Even if we take a loss on it, I'm afraid it's indispensable."
    "Is that true of the mail drive, too?"
    "Well, it's what we call the widow's mite. It's not the mite that counts, but how it affects your major contributors. Big donors hate to feel they're doing the whole thing. The widow's mite makes them feel that the burden's being shared."
    "Even if it's not?"
    "Well, they're apt to take the wish for the deed. There are certain rituals in these campaigns."
    "But a mail drive like this one is a terrible waste of paper. What do we expect by way of response? Two per cent? Will all our national forests be consumed by these voluminous appeals?"
    "If you have conservationists on your board who object to that, we might try to work out something by telephone. Or even a radio appeal. TV is best, of course, but I don't think we can afford it, unless a station will donate the time."
    I was beginning to be fascinated. Did nothing daunt her? Had she no principles? Would she work simultaneously on pro- and anti-abortion programs? For the NAACP and South African investors? Would she undertake a campaign to rehabilitate the Mafia? The only hint I had that she was human was my sense that she knew I was watching her. Once I thought she sent me the trace of a smile, as if she recognized that I was "on" to her.
    I was to see a lot more of Mrs. Sands that day, because after our conference my client drove directly home to Greenwich and suggested that I give our fund raiser a lift downtown in a cab. She had promised the director of the museum that she would first visit a loan show of old ecclesiastic treasures: chalices, reliquaries, ciboriums and the like, and I accompanied her to the large, dark, unpeopled central gallery.
    She walked slowly but without stopping past the glass cases of glittering objects. We paused at last before a missal bound in silver gilt and studded with large semiprecious stones.
    I broke our silence. "Doesn't it make you feel that God must have been an old Jewish banker living on Fifth Avenue behind a Beaux Arts front?"
    Again her faint smile seemed to confirm our sympathy. "Well, J. P. Morgan went in for this kind of thing, too. But he lived in a brownstone on Madison."
    "When he ran his fingertips over those stones, do you suppose he thought of God?"
    "As you imply,
his
god."
    "A god who likes the bones and teeth and nails of his saints immured in gold and