Monday 1 October 2018

Louis Auchincloss gets it (Portrait in Brownstone pub.1962)


Hugo looked at her suspiciously. He was not a bit sure that she cared about beautiful things. She lacked the smallest inclination for the abstract or philosophic. Her alert eye went straight from the general design to the specific detail, as her mind raced to the nearest pigeonhole. ‘I get it’ was the phrase most often on her lips. She seemed bent on reducing the wilderness of observed phenomena to an ordered garden, with white labels tied to the stem of every flower. But once defined there was an end to a subject; Alfreda was ready and eager to move to the next. She saw no point in dallying, in turning things over, in pondering their implications. Nor, in truth, did Hugo, but the exaggeration in her of his own intellectual bad habits made him uneasily aware of the toll of their kind of bright, picking mentality . And it exasperated him that everything he tried to teach her was immediately drawn through the tight sieve of her preconceptions, so that only what she had already believed remained.
(from Portrait in Brownstone by Louis Auchincloss)

A suitable match for darling Hugo and Mother will make sure of it. Alfreda is holding out for an ambassador and doesn’t see Hugo as a contender. He must be built up, amplified by power and position. It’s not the money, because one has never known anything else. Alfreda must be made to see him, to get him.



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