“I may do that when the economy is steadier,” he said, “but at present I feel I should do everything I can to see that people have necessities.” And we both took reflective pulls at the excellent whiskies-and-soda he had provided.

Boy’s new bread company made quite a public stir with their advertisements declaring that they would hold the price of bread steady. And they did so, though the loaves seemed to be a bit puffier and gassier than they had been before. We ate them at the school, so I was able to judge.

There was filial piety, as well as altruism, in Boy’s decision. Old Doc Staunton’s annoyance at being outsmarted by his son had given way to his cupidity, and the old man was a large holder in Alpha. To have associated him with beer would have made trouble, and Boy never looked for trouble.

“Alpha concentrates on necessities,” Boy liked to say. “In times like these, people need cheap, nourishing food. If a family can’t buy meat, our vitaminized biscuits are still within their reach.” So much so, indeed, that Boy was fast becoming one of the truly rich, by which I mean one of those men whose personal income, though large, is a trifling part of the huge, mystical body of wealth that stands behind them and cannot be counted, only estimated.

A few cranky politicians of the most radical party tried to estimate it in order to show that, in some way, the very existence of Boy was intolerable in a country where people were in want. But, like so many idealists, they did not understand money, and after a meeting where they had lambasted Boy and others like him and threatened to confiscate their wealth at the first opportunity, they would adjourn to cheap restaurants, where they drank his sugar, and ate his sugar, and smoked cigarettes which, had they known it, benefited some other monster they sought to destroy.

I used to hear him abused by some of the junior masters at the school. They were Englishmen or Canadians who had studied in England, and they were full of the wisdom of the London School of Economics and the doctrines of The New Statesman, copies of which used to limp into the Common Room about a month after publication. I have never been sure of my own political opinions (historical studies and my fondness for myth and legend have always blunted my political partisanship), but it amused me to hear these poor fellows, working for terrible salaries, denouncing Boy and a handful of others as “ca-pittle-ists”; they always stressed the middle syllables, this being a fashionable pronunciation of the period, and one that seemed to make rich men especially contemptible. I never raised my voice in protest, and none of my colleagues ever knew that I was personally acquainted with the ca-pittle-ist whose good looks, elegant style of life, and somewhat gross success made their own hard fortune and their leather-elbowed jackets and world-weary flannel trousers seem pitiful. This was not disloyalty; rather, it seemed to me that the Boy they hated and did not know was unrelated to the Boy I saw about once a fortnight and often more frequently.