Skinny Island by Louis Auchincloss Page B

and hideous purple eyebrows, laughing her high, shrieking abominable laugh, culminating in a screamed "Oh! Oh! Oh!" and apparently taking over Elaine's old New York circle. She quickened her step, only to be stopped by the marquise's direct address.
    "Isn't that Elaine Wagstaff? Of course it is! Elaine, darling, don't run away. We were just speaking of you. Tell us the truth. Tell us that you've been libeled."
    Elaine paused, smiling briefly at the others, considering, with perfectly justified smugness, that she was better preserved than any of them. "How have I been libeled, Adelaide? I must warn you, it may be perfectly true."
    The table exploded in remonstrance, as if she had not been in jest.
    "Oh, it can't be!"
    "We won't believe it."
    "Never. You, almost a
Française!
"
    "What is it, girls?" Elaine demanded, surprised.
    "They
say
" Adelaide murmured throatily, "they say, my dear, that you're ... America First."
    Elaine stared coolly at each of the five in turn. She finished with the Marquise de Monrives.
    "And what are you, Adelaide? America Last?"
    And she reveled in the quick stride of her own immediate departure.
    She told Suzannah about the incident with pride; the latter was vociferous in her enthusiasm.
    "Oh, Mummy, you and I are really together at last! I'm so happy. You're free of those horrible harpies."
    But Elaine did not like this classification of her friends. "Adelaide I give up to you freely, my dear, but the others? I don't think you can call Florence King a harpy. Or Mel-anie Codman."
    "Oh, maybe not exactly harpies. I guess I went too far there. But they belong to that international set that feels so much closer to London and Paris than they do to Chicago or Des Moines. And they wouldn't hesitate to shed American blood to save Eton or Oxford or the Comédie Française or the Grand Prix. They're not real Americans, Mummy. And now that I've got you away from them, after all these years, I'm damned if I'm going to let them snatch you back!"
    Elaine was struck by the sudden idea that Suzie might be identifying all the things that her mother had preferred to herself in the past—parties in Paris, racing, gambling, beautiful people—with the Allied cause in Europe. It was as if Hitler were fighting high society and gaining an odd respectability by doing so!
    "I think you'll find that many of the husbands of my friends had honorable war records."
    "But don't you see, Mummy, back then it was the same thing! They were fighting for Anglo-French imperialism!"
    Elaine was still too much alone in her new life to dispense with Suzie's support, but she began now to wonder how long she would need quite so many bristling turrets and machicolated battlements. Her daughter and son-in-law appeared to bring to the task of keeping America out of the war an animus against their opponents far bitterer than seemed required. Peyton Priest, like his wife, had little use for the survival of the kind of world that Elaine still wistfully missed and had perhaps too willfully loved. Indeed, he went further than she did.
    "Suzie tells me you're really one of us now," Peyton told her that night before dinner, patting the hand into which he then placed one of his sugary rum cocktails. He looked at her with that guarded twinkle, that suspended husk of a smile, that was supposed to conceal, or at least cover, his distrust of all nonlegal minds and of female minds in particular. "I am very happy about that. You can now be our Trojan horse in the Colony Club."
    "Don't you and Suzie go a little bit far there? Some of my fellow members are very intelligent women."
    "Intelligent, my dear Elaine, of course! Have I ever denied it? My only point is that there are certain vital factors in modern life of which they are simply unaware. Because they exclude Jews from their society, they are ignorant of the force and organization of Jewish opinion. They are unaware, therefore, of the extent to which they are being manipulated."
    "You