Tuesday night, Louis Auchincloss died at 92. Widely lauded as a chronicler of the WASP aristocracy, I think he is much better categorized as a novelist of ethics.

As someone who grew up in a family of lawyers, Auchincloss’s stories of the dilemmas of a private lawyer resonated. I well remember the evening I stumbled on Tales of Manhattan (1967). I read it in one sitting. The Injustice Collectors (1950) followed a few days later.

The Rector of Justin (1964) is the story of succession at a New England prep school. One could teach a few executive seminars based on it. It is also a text for young people entering the culture of the workplace. Few books better illustrate the consequences of misplaced loyalties, of the misjudgments of inexperience.

In appreciations, one customarily praises the writer’s wisdom. What appealed most to me about Auchincloss was his struggle to understand the inexplicable and his acknowledgment of his failure.

The last novel of his I read, a couple of summers ago, was The Embezzler (1966). In it, Auchincloss tried to come to grips with Richard Whitney’s betrayal of his family, friends and social class. The president of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, Whitney had bravely if ultimately futilely attempted to stem the panic. In 1938, he went to jail for stealing from family trusts and the New York Yacht Club.

The Embezzler is, kindly put, a mess of novel. But as a meditation on betrayals inconceivable to the author, it is moving, almost magnificent.

I read The Embezzler because Auchincloss was the subject of a brilliant profile by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker two years ago, much of which is about The Embezzler. The article is behind a firewall. It is well worth paying for.

George Orwell, in books such as The Road to Wigan Pier, urged “common decency” as the standard for social and economic justice in the Depression. Observing law offices, board rooms and headmasters studies starting a decade later, Louis Auchincloss gave voice to the nobility of decency.

That Orwell and Auchincloss were talking about the same thing would have surprised neither the bohemian nor the aristocrat.