More WASPs in the Ivy : THE LADY OF SITUATIONS <i> By Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin: $20.95; 275 pp.; 0-395-54411-4) </i>

Stephen Hill, he of the “romantic good looks, with very pale skin and lustrous raven hair” and “moist brown eyes,” was having a discussion with his siblings about his mother’s love for his father.

“And looking at his sisters, he wondered if indeed any woman was capable of a great passion. Was that why Averhill had seemed to him such a citadel of romantic feeling? Precisely because it was a male monastery?”

Such is the stuff of “The Lady of Situations,” another in the long line of boys’-prep-school-as-male-monastery stories brought to us by the popular author, Louis Auchincloss.

This saga is a romantic yarn set in the ‘30s and ‘40s about a socially striving poor girl, Natica Chauncey, who grows up on the wrong side of a rich New England community and sets her angry sights on conquering the white-columned Averhill boys school in order to retrieve her Depression-ruined family reputation.

It’s the kind of upper-crust scenario that has made Auchincloss a minor icon among prolific fiction writers, a man lionized at New York social functions for his 40-odd works that often are set on the shelf next to Wharton, Marquand and O’Hara.

One should pay attention to a new Auchincloss, for he has proved his literary merit in the past. But “The Lady of Situations” is still another portrait of the basically unsullied WASP world where its author (a Groton and Yale graduate) chooses to linger. It is an arcane universe where the worst that happens is a bit of polite adultery rocking the walls of the “monastery,” plus some milder breaches of honor.

Characters speak operatically. Aunt Ruth, for example, describes how a group of mean boys are treating dear little Natica in the dining room at a fancy party: “I had a horrid fantasy that I should soon be hearing, as in the second act of Tosca, the cries from the offstage torture chamber.” You get the picture.

Even if one embraced the fashion these days for non-involved “fun reading,” and decided to stretch out by the fire to engage in mindless pleasure, it simply cannot be ignored that this kind of work is shockingly outpaced by some truly intriguing current social essayists.

If you must look at upper-class private-school life, wouldn’t you turn to film-maker Whit Stillman’s new portrait of Park Avenue preppies in “Metropolitan”? Or watch “Dead Poet’s Society” again?

Or pick up Robert Sam Anson’s riveting nonfiction look at the racial horrors at Andover? Or, for an earlier setting, re-read John Gunther’s moving story about headmaster Frank Boyden and life at Deerfield Academy, the graceful “Death Be Not Proud”?

There’s something vainglorious about struggling to keep the traditional novel of manners alive in the style of William Dean Howells or Henry James at a time when men’s clubs and men’s schools and ladies’ clubs and schools are co-ed and diverse, making prissy Turn-of-the-Century manners so uninteresting. With ethical and moral struggles presented by AIDS, drugs, racial tensions and modern greed, more vivid tales are available.

If Howells were alive today, he would be down at some public high school in the South Bronx trying to beat Tom Wolfe out of the real story.

It is no doubt Auchincloss’ fond hope that his work bridges time and that his treatments of love, sex, religion, philosophy and the struggle to hold a moral standard against the pressures of modernity holds up as a contemporary morality play. Indeed, he pretty much managed this Jamesian feat once, in his 1964 work, “The Rector of Justin.” But, in “The Lady of Situations,” a startlingly similar story, he did not.

The books have virtually the same story line. The hero in the first (Brian Aspinwall) enters life on the prep school campus (Justin), idolizes the headmaster (the rector) only to doubt him and consequently resolve his doubt by returning to school and the glorious chore of writing his hero’s biography.

In “The Lady of Situations,” our heroine marries into life on the campus of a prep school she idealizes, becomes disenchanted, leaves, becomes a lawyer with a rich husband and then sends her children to the fancy prep school, thus demonstrating to the world her glorious end. In “Rector,” there was the central character of a headmaster, Frank Prescott. “Lady” is built around the dominant, legendary headmaster, Rufus Lockwood.

In each, there are young and virtuous teaching masters. Each has at least one beautiful, willful young woman who is smarter than the men to whom she is subservient, a fact silently recognized by the aforementioned all-seeing Head.

Both books are structured as memoirs: “Rector” the shuffled journals of Brian and “Lady” the memoirs of dear and hearty Aunt Ruth.

Disavow yourself of the notion that this “Lady’s” version is differentiated in any significant way by its attempts to spotlight women. While the heroine does magically become a lawyer virtually overnight in the late 1940s, and does subsequently find herself preparing the brief for a case involving separate but equal schools, this is no feminist work. Natica Chauncey sees herself as a Bronte sister, “without the moors and without the genius.” She is clever in that standard all-women-are-connivers way. Like other females in the book, she marries her way to the top, which takes her three tries.

The other female characters hardly fill out the picture. There are the requisite eccentrics, old bats with pretensions, like Estelle Knight, who would have been “the divine Sarah” had she had a choice but writes poetry and smuggles jewels instead.

Basically, “Lady” is another male-monastery book, and one cannot help wondering about the repetition of “Rector,” which was a complex, subtle and well-written variation on the theme. The answer perhaps can be found back in the earlier work, where Cordelia, the rector’s daughter, wonders why Brian Aspinwall would take the time to write a book about his headmaster. She refers Brian to her shrink: “Perhaps you have what Dr. Klaus calls ‘Peter Panic.’ You want to be a schoolboy again.”