The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

can think of no better illustration of this than the fact that in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind.

chalk it up to weakness on my part, hubris on Henry’s, too much Greek prose composition—whatever you like.

“Do not fear,” he said to me. “It is the mother. She is concerned with the dishonor of the son having to do with wine.”

“There has been much rumor,” he said at last. “The mother grieves. Not for her son,” he added hastily, when he saw I was about to speak, “for she is a wicked woman. Rather she grieves for the shame which has fallen on her house.”

Without warning I had a vision of Francis—twenty years later, fifty years, in a wheelchair. And of myself—older, too, sitting around with him in some smoky room, the two of us repeating this exchange for the thousandth time. At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny’s death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.

“About a Hindu saint being able to slay a thousand on the battlefield and it not being a sin unless he felt remorse.” I had heard Julian say this, but had never understood what he meant. “We’re not Hindus,” I said.

I could say that the secret of Julian’s charm was that he latched on to young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own.