CHAPTER 1. The Debutante

Produced by David Reed, Ken Reeder, and David Widger

[Illustration]

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

... Well this side of Paradise!... There’s

little comfort in the wise. —Rupert Brooke.

Experience is the name so many people give

to their mistakes. —Oscar Wilde.

To SIGOURNEY FAY

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE—The Romantic Egotist

CHAPTER 1. Amory, Son of Beatrice

CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles

CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers

CHAPTER 4. Narcissus Off Duty

INTERLUDE

BOOK TWO—The Education of a Personage

CHAPTER 1. The Debutante

CHAPTER 2. Experiments in Convalescence

CHAPTER 3. Young Irony

CHAPTER 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice

CHAPTER 5. The Egotist Becomes a Personage

BOOK ONE—The Romantic Egotist

CHAPTER 1. Amory, Son of Beatrice

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the

stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father,

an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a

habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy

at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful

Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world

was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In

consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height

of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial

moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For

many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an

unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless,

silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife,

continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t

understand her.

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on

her father’s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the

Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her

youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally

wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the

consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant

education she had—her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was

versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by

name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and

Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have

had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to

prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened

in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice

O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite

impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of

things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming

about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all

ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped

the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

In her less important moments she returned to America, met

Stephen Blaine and married him—this almost entirely because she

was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was

carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a

spring day in ninety-six.

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for

her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which

he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a

taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did

the country with his mother in her father’s private car, from

Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous

breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she

took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased

her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her

atmosphere—especially after several astounding bracers.

So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying

governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored

or read to from “Do and Dare,” or “Frank on the Mississippi,”

Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing

a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and

deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.

“Amory.”

“Yes, Beatrice.” (Such a quaint name for his mother; she

encouraged it.)

“Dear, don’t _think_ of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always

suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.

Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up.”

“All right.”

“I am feeling very old to-day, Amory,” she would sigh, her face a

rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands

as facile as Bernhardt’s. “My nerves are on edge—on edge. We must

leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for

sunshine.”

Amory’s penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled

hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about

her.

“Amory.”

“Oh, _yes_.”

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and

just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

She fed him sections of the “Fetes Galantes” before he was ten;

at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of

Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone

in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother’s apricot

cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy.

This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his

exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though

this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and

became part of what in a later generation would have been termed

her “line.”

“This son of mine,” he heard her tell a room full of awestruck,

admiring women one day, “is entirely sophisticated and quite

charming—but delicate—we’re all delicate; _here_, you know.” Her

hand was radiantly outlined against her beautiful bosom; then

sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot

cordial. They rejoiced, for she was a brave raconteuse, but many

were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night against the

possible defection of little Bobby or Barbara....

These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids,

the private car, or Mr. Blaine when available, and very often a

physician. When Amory had the whooping-cough four disgusted

specialists glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he

took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including physicians

and nurses, totalled fourteen. However, blood being thicker than

broth, he was pulled through.

The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of

Lake Geneva; they had quite enough relatives to serve in place of

friends, and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But

Beatrice grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances,

as there were certain stories, such as the history of her

constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years

abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat at regular

intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else

they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves. But Beatrice was

critical about American women, especially the floating population

of ex-Westerners.

“They have accents, my dear,” she told Amory, “not Southern

accents or Boston accents, not an accent attached to any

locality, just an accent”—she became dreamy. “They pick up old,

moth-eaten London accents that are down on their luck and have to

be used by some one. They talk as an English butler might after

several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.” She became

almost incoherent—“Suppose—time in every Western woman’s life—she

feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to

have—accent—they try to impress _me_, my dear—”

Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she

considered her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her

life. She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests

were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing

or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an

enchantingly wavering attitude. Often she deplored the bourgeois

quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that

had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals

her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome.

Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport.

“Ah, Bishop Wiston,” she would declare, “I do not want to talk of

myself. I can imagine the stream of hysterical women fluttering

at your doors, beseeching you to be simpatico”—then after an

interlude filled by the clergyman—“but my mood—is—oddly

dissimilar.”

Only to bishops and above did she divulge her clerical romance.

When she had first returned to her country there had been a

pagan, Swinburnian young man in Asheville, for whose passionate

kisses and unsentimental conversations she had taken a decided

penchant—they had discussed the matter pro and con with an

intellectual romancing quite devoid of sappiness. Eventually she

had decided to marry for background, and the young pagan from

Asheville had gone through a spiritual crisis, joined the

Catholic Church, and was now—Monsignor Darcy.

“Indeed, Mrs. Blaine, he is still delightful company—quite the

cardinal’s right-hand man.”

“Amory will go to him one day, I know,” breathed the beautiful

lady, “and Monsignor Darcy will understand him as he understood

me.”

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than

ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally—the

idea being that he was to “keep up,” at each place “taking up the

work where he left off,” yet as no tutor ever found the place he

left off, his mind was still in very good shape. What a few more

years of this life would have made of him is problematical.

However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with Beatrice,

his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and

after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the

amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around

and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier. You will

admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.

After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a

suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in

Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his

aunt and uncle. There the crude, vulgar air of Western

civilization first catches him—in his underwear, so to speak.

A KISS FOR AMORY

His lip curled when he read it.

“I am going to have a bobbing party,” it said, “on Thursday, December

the seventeenth, at five o’clock, and I would like it very much if

you could come.

Yours truly,

R.S.V.P. Myra St. Claire.

He had been two months in Minneapolis, and his chief struggle had

been the concealing from “the other guys at school” how

particularly superior he felt himself to be, yet this conviction

was built upon shifting sands. He had shown off one day in French

class (he was in senior French class) to the utter confusion of

Mr. Reardon, whose accent Amory damned contemptuously, and to the

delight of the class. Mr. Reardon, who had spent several weeks in

Paris ten years before, took his revenge on the verbs, whenever

he had his book open. But another time Amory showed off in

history class, with quite disastrous results, for the boys there

were his own age, and they shrilled innuendoes at each other all

the following week:

“Aw—I b’lieve, doncherknow, the Umuricun revolution was _lawgely_

an affair of the middul _clawses_,” or

“Washington came of very good blood—aw, quite good—I b’lieve.”

Amory ingeniously tried to retrieve himself by blundering on

purpose. Two years before he had commenced a history of the

United States which, though it only got as far as the Colonial

Wars, had been pronounced by his mother completely enchanting.

His chief disadvantage lay in athletics, but as soon as he

discovered that it was the touchstone of power and popularity at

school, he began to make furious, persistent efforts to excel in

the winter sports, and with his ankles aching and bending in

spite of his efforts, he skated valiantly around the Lorelie rink

every afternoon, wondering how soon he would be able to carry a

hockey-stick without getting it inexplicably tangled in his

skates.

The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire’s bobbing party spent the

morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical

affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle. During the afternoon

he brought it to light with a sigh, and after some consideration

and a preliminary draft in the back of Collar and Daniel’s

“First-Year Latin,” composed an answer:

My dear Miss St. Claire: Your truly charming envitation for the

evening of next Thursday evening was truly delightful to receive this

morning. I will be charm and inchanted indeed to present my

compliments on next Thursday evening. Faithfully,

Amory Blaine.

On Thursday, therefore, he walked pensively along the slippery,

shovel-scraped sidewalks, and came in sight of Myra’s house, on

the half-hour after five, a lateness which he fancied his mother

would have favored. He waited on the door-step with his eyes

nonchalantly half-closed, and planned his entrance with

precision. He would cross the floor, not too hastily, to Mrs. St.

Claire, and say with exactly the correct modulation:

“My _dear_ Mrs. St. Claire, I’m _frightfully_ sorry to be late,

but my maid”—he paused there and realized he would be

quoting—“but my uncle and I had to see a fella—Yes, I’ve met your

enchanting daughter at dancing-school.”

Then he would shake hands, using that slight, half-foreign bow,

with all the starchy little females, and nod to the fellas who

would be standing ’round, paralyzed into rigid groups for mutual

protection.

A butler (one of the three in Minneapolis) swung open the door.

Amory stepped inside and divested himself of cap and coat. He was

mildly surprised not to hear the shrill squawk of conversation

from the next room, and he decided it must be quite formal. He

approved of that—as he approved of the butler.

“Miss Myra,” he said.

To his surprise the butler grinned horribly.

“Oh, yeah,” he declared, “she’s here.” He was unaware that his

failure to be cockney was ruining his standing. Amory considered

him coldly.

“But,” continued the butler, his voice rising unnecessarily,

“she’s the only one what _is_ here. The party’s gone.”

Amory gasped in sudden horror.

“What?”

“She’s been waitin’ for Amory Blaine. That’s you, ain’t it? Her

mother says that if you showed up by five-thirty you two was to

go after ’em in the Packard.”

Amory’s despair was crystallized by the appearance of Myra

herself, bundled to the ears in a polo coat, her face plainly

sulky, her voice pleasant only with difficulty.

“’Lo, Amory.”

“’Lo, Myra.” He had described the state of his vitality.

“Well—you _got_ here, _any_ways.”

“Well—I’ll tell you. I guess you don’t know about the auto

accident,” he romanced.

Myra’s eyes opened wide.

“Who was it to?”

“Well,” he continued desperately, “uncle ’n aunt ’n I.”

“Was any one _killed?_”

Amory paused and then nodded.

“Your uncle?”—alarm.

“Oh, no just a horse—a sorta gray horse.”

At this point the Erse butler snickered.

“Probably killed the engine,” he suggested. Amory would have put

him on the rack without a scruple.

“We’ll go now,” said Myra coolly. “You see, Amory, the bobs were

ordered for five and everybody was here, so we couldn’t wait—”

“Well, I couldn’t help it, could I?”

“So mama said for me to wait till ha’past five. We’ll catch the

bobs before it gets to the Minnehaha Club, Amory.”

Amory’s shredded poise dropped from him. He pictured the happy

party jingling along snowy streets, the appearance of the

limousine, the horrible public descent of him and Myra before

sixty reproachful eyes, his apology—a real one this time. He

sighed aloud.

“What?” inquired Myra.

“Nothing. I was just yawning. Are we going to _surely_ catch up

with ’em before they get there?” He was encouraging a faint hope

that they might slip into the Minnehaha Club and meet the others

there, be found in blasé seclusion before the fire and quite

regain his lost attitude.

“Oh, sure Mike, we’ll catch ’em all right—let’s hurry.”

He became conscious of his stomach. As they stepped into the

machine he hurriedly slapped the paint of diplomacy over a rather

box-like plan he had conceived. It was based upon some

“trade-lasts” gleaned at dancing-school, to the effect that he

was “awful good-looking and _English_, sort of.”

“Myra,” he said, lowering his voice and choosing his words

carefully, “I beg a thousand pardons. Can you ever forgive me?”

She regarded him gravely, his intent green eyes, his mouth, that

to her thirteen-year-old, arrow-collar taste was the quintessence

of romance. Yes, Myra could forgive him very easily.

“Why—yes—sure.”

He looked at her again, and then dropped his eyes. He had lashes.

“I’m awful,” he said sadly. “I’m diff’runt. I don’t know why I

make faux pas. ’Cause I don’t care, I s’pose.” Then, recklessly:

“I been smoking too much. I’ve got t’bacca heart.”

Myra pictured an all-night tobacco debauch, with Amory pale and

reeling from the effect of nicotined lungs. She gave a little

gasp.

“Oh, _Amory_, don’t smoke. You’ll stunt your _growth!_”

“I don’t care,” he persisted gloomily. “I gotta. I got the habit.

I’ve done a lot of things that if my fambly knew”—he hesitated,

giving her imagination time to picture dark horrors—“I went to

the burlesque show last week.”

Myra was quite overcome. He turned the green eyes on her again.

“You’re the only girl in town I like much,” he exclaimed in a

rush of sentiment. “You’re simpatico.”

Myra was not sure that she was, but it sounded stylish though

vaguely improper.

Thick dusk had descended outside, and as the limousine made a

sudden turn she was jolted against him; their hands touched.

“You shouldn’t smoke, Amory,” she whispered. “Don’t you know

that?”

He shook his head.

“Nobody cares.”

Myra hesitated.

“_I_ care.”

Something stirred within Amory.

“Oh, yes, you do! You got a crush on Froggy Parker. I guess

everybody knows that.”

“No, I haven’t,” very slowly.

A silence, while Amory thrilled. There was something fascinating

about Myra, shut away here cosily from the dim, chill air. Myra,

a little bundle of clothes, with strands of yellow hair curling

out from under her skating cap.

“Because I’ve got a crush, too—” He paused, for he heard in the

distance the sound of young laughter, and, peering through the

frosted glass along the lamp-lit street, he made out the dark

outline of the bobbing party. He must act quickly. He reached

over with a violent, jerky effort, and clutched Myra’s hand—her

thumb, to be exact.

“Tell him to go to the Minnehaha straight,” he whispered. “I

wanta talk to you—I _got_ to talk to you.”

Myra made out the party ahead, had an instant vision of her

mother, and then—alas for convention—glanced into the eyes

beside. “Turn down this side street, Richard, and drive straight

to the Minnehaha Club!” she cried through the speaking tube.

Amory sank back against the cushions with a sigh of relief.

“I can kiss her,” he thought. “I’ll bet I can. I’ll _bet_ I can!”

Overhead the sky was half crystalline, half misty, and the night

around was chill and vibrant with rich tension. From the Country

Club steps the roads stretched away, dark creases on the white

blanket; huge heaps of snow lining the sides like the tracks of

giant moles. They lingered for a moment on the steps, and watched

the white holiday moon.

“Pale moons like that one”—Amory made a vague gesture—“make

people mysterieuse. You look like a young witch with her cap off

and her hair sorta mussed”—her hands clutched at her hair—“Oh,

leave it, it looks _good_.”

They drifted up the stairs and Myra led the way into the little

den of his dreams, where a cosy fire was burning before a big

sink-down couch. A few years later this was to be a great stage

for Amory, a cradle for many an emotional crisis. Now they talked

for a moment about bobbing parties.

“There’s always a bunch of shy fellas,” he commented, “sitting at

the tail of the bob, sorta lurkin’ an’ whisperin’ an’ pushin’

each other off. Then there’s always some crazy cross-eyed

girl”—he gave a terrifying imitation—“she’s always talkin’

_hard_, sorta, to the chaperon.”

“You’re such a funny boy,” puzzled Myra.

“How d’y’ mean?” Amory gave immediate attention, on his own

ground at last.

“Oh—always talking about crazy things. Why don’t you come ski-ing

with Marylyn and I to-morrow?”

“I don’t like girls in the daytime,” he said shortly, and then,

thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: “But I like you.” He

cleared his throat. “I like you first and second and third.”

Myra’s eyes became dreamy. What a story this would make to tell

Marylyn! Here on the couch with this _wonderful_-looking boy—the

little fire—the sense that they were alone in the great building—

Myra capitulated. The atmosphere was too appropriate.

“I like you the first twenty-five,” she confessed, her voice

trembling, “and Froggy Parker twenty-sixth.”

Froggy had fallen twenty-five places in one hour. As yet he had

not even noticed it.

But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed

Myra’s cheek. He had never kissed a girl before, and he tasted

his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit. Then

their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

“We’re awful,” rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into

his, her head drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion

seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He

desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to

kiss any one; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their

clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide

somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.

“Kiss me again.” Her voice came out of a great void.

“I don’t want to,” he heard himself saying. There was another

pause.

“I don’t want to!” he repeated passionately.

Myra sprang up, her cheeks pink with bruised vanity, the great

bow on the back of her head trembling sympathetically.

“I hate you!” she cried. “Don’t you ever dare to speak to me

again!”

“What?” stammered Amory.

“I’ll tell mama you kissed me! I will too! I will too! I’ll tell

mama, and she won’t let me play with you!”

Amory rose and stared at her helplessly, as though she were a new

animal of whose presence on the earth he had not heretofore been

aware.

The door opened suddenly, and Myra’s mother appeared on the

threshold, fumbling with her lorgnette.

“Well,” she began, adjusting it benignantly, “the man at the desk

told me you two children were up here—How do you do, Amory.”

Amory watched Myra and waited for the crash—but none came. The

pout faded, the high pink subsided, and Myra’s voice was placid

as a summer lake when she answered her mother.

“Oh, we started so late, mama, that I thought we might as well—”

He heard from below the shrieks of laughter, and smelled the

vapid odor of hot chocolate and tea-cakes as he silently followed

mother and daughter down-stairs. The sound of the graphophone

mingled with the voices of many girls humming the air, and a

faint glow was born and spread over him:

“Casey-Jones—mounted to the cab-un Casey-Jones—’th his orders in his

hand. Casey-Jones—mounted to the cab-un Took his farewell journey to

the prom-ised land.”

SNAPSHOTS OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST

Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he

wore moccasins that were born yellow, but after many applications

of oil and dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish

brown; he wore a gray plaid mackinaw coat, and a red toboggan

cap. His dog, Count Del Monte, ate the red cap, so his uncle gave

him a gray one that pulled down over his face. The trouble with

this one was that you breathed into it and your breath froze; one

day the darn thing froze his cheek. He rubbed snow on his cheek,

but it turned bluish-black just the same.

The Count Del Monte ate a box of bluing once, but it didn’t hurt

him. Later, however, he lost his mind and ran madly up the

street, bumping into fences, rolling in gutters, and pursuing his

eccentric course out of Amory’s life. Amory cried on his bed.

“Poor little Count,” he cried. “Oh, _poor_ little _Count!_”

After several months he suspected Count of a fine piece of

emotional acting.

Amory and Frog Parker considered that the greatest line in

literature occurred in Act III of “Arsene Lupin.”

They sat in the first row at the Wednesday and Saturday matinees.

The line was:

“If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best

thing is to be a great criminal.”

Amory fell in love again, and wrote a poem. This was it:

“Marylyn and Sallee, Those are the girls for me. Marylyn stands

above Sallee in that sweet, deep love.”

He was interested in whether McGovern of Minnesota would make the

first or second All-American, how to do the card-pass, how to do

the coin-pass, chameleon ties, how babies were born, and whether

Three-fingered Brown was really a better pitcher than Christie

Mathewson.

Among other things he read: “For the Honor of the School,”

“Little Women” (twice), “The Common Law,” “Sapho,” “Dangerous Dan

McGrew,” “The Broad Highway” (three times), “The Fall of the

House of Usher,” “Three Weeks,” “Mary Ware, the Little Colonel’s

Chum,” “Gunga Din,” The Police Gazette, and Jim-Jam Jems.

He had all the Henty biasses in history, and was particularly

fond of the cheerful murder stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart.

School ruined his French and gave him a distaste for standard

authors. His masters considered him idle, unreliable and

superficially clever.

He collected locks of hair from many girls. He wore the rings of

several. Finally he could borrow no more rings, owing to his

nervous habit of chewing them out of shape. This, it seemed,

usually aroused the jealous suspicions of the next borrower.

All through the summer months Amory and Frog Parker went each

week to the Stock Company. Afterward they would stroll home in

the balmy air of August night, dreaming along Hennepin and

Nicollet Avenues, through the gay crowd. Amory wondered how

people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory,

and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes

stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and

walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen.

Always, after he was in bed, there were voices—indefinite,

fading, enchanting—just outside his window, and before he fell

asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one

about becoming a great half-back, or the one about the Japanese

invasion, when he was rewarded by being made the youngest general

in the world. It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the

being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.

CODE OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST

Before he was summoned back to Lake Geneva, he had appeared, shy

but inwardly glowing, in his first long trousers, set off by a

purple accordion tie and a “Belmont” collar with the edges

unassailably meeting, purple socks, and handkerchief with a

purple border peeping from his breast pocket. But more than that,

he had formulated his first philosophy, a code to live by, which,

as near as it can be named, was a sort of aristocratic egotism.

He had realized that his best interests were bound up with those

of a certain variant, changing person, whose label, in order that

his past might always be identified with him, was Amory Blaine.

Amory marked himself a fortunate youth, capable of infinite

expansion for good or evil. He did not consider himself a “strong

char’c’ter,” but relied on his facility (learn things sorta

quick) and his superior mentality (read a lotta deep books). He

was proud of the fact that he could never become a mechanical or

scientific genius. From no other heights was he debarred.

Physically.—Amory thought that he was exceedingly handsome. He

was. He fancied himself an athlete of possibilities and a supple

dancer.

Socially.—Here his condition was, perhaps, most dangerous. He

granted himself personality, charm, magnetism, poise, the power

of dominating all contemporary males, the gift of fascinating all

women.

Mentally.—Complete, unquestioned superiority.

Now a confession will have to be made. Amory had rather a Puritan

conscience. Not that he yielded to it—later in life he almost

completely slew it—but at fifteen it made him consider himself a

great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the

desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil...

a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to

cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness...

a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.

There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise

through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older

boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off

his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was

a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable

of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage,

perseverance, nor self-respect.

Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a

sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to “pass” as

many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with

this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

PREPARATORY TO THE GREAT ADVENTURE

The train slowed up with midsummer languor at Lake Geneva, and

Amory caught sight of his mother waiting in her electric on the

gravelled station drive. It was an ancient electric, one of the

early types, and painted gray. The sight of her sitting there,

slenderly erect, and of her face, where beauty and dignity

combined, melting to a dreamy recollected smile, filled him with

a sudden great pride of her. As they kissed coolly and he stepped

into the electric, he felt a quick fear lest he had lost the

requisite charm to measure up to her.

“Dear boy—you’re _so_ tall... look behind and see if there’s

anything coming...”

She looked left and right, she slipped cautiously into a speed of

two miles an hour, beseeching Amory to act as sentinel; and at

one busy crossing she made him get out and run ahead to signal

her forward like a traffic policeman. Beatrice was what might be

termed a careful driver.

“You _are_ tall—but you’re still very handsome—you’ve skipped the

awkward age, or is that sixteen; perhaps it’s fourteen or

fifteen; I can never remember; but you’ve skipped it.”

“Don’t embarrass me,” murmured Amory.

“But, my dear boy, what odd clothes! They look as if they were a

_set_—don’t they? Is your underwear purple, too?”

Amory grunted impolitely.

“You must go to Brooks’ and get some really nice suits. Oh, we’ll

have a talk to-night or perhaps to-morrow night. I want to tell

you about your heart—you’ve probably been neglecting your

heart—and you don’t _know_.”

Amory thought how superficial was the recent overlay of his own

generation. Aside from a minute shyness, he felt that the old

cynical kinship with his mother had not been one bit broken. Yet

for the first few days he wandered about the gardens and along

the shore in a state of superloneliness, finding a lethargic

content in smoking “Bull” at the garage with one of the

chauffeurs.

The sixty acres of the estate were dotted with old and new summer

houses and many fountains and white benches that came suddenly

into sight from foliage-hung hiding-places; there was a great and

constantly increasing family of white cats that prowled the many

flower-beds and were silhouetted suddenly at night against the

darkening trees. It was on one of the shadowy paths that Beatrice

at last captured Amory, after Mr. Blaine had, as usual, retired

for the evening to his private library. After reproving him for

avoiding her, she took him for a long tete-a-tete in the

moonlight. He could not reconcile himself to her beauty, that was

mother to his own, the exquisite neck and shoulders, the grace of

a fortunate woman of thirty.

“Amory, dear,” she crooned softly, “I had such a strange, weird

time after I left you.”

“Did you, Beatrice?”

“When I had my last breakdown”—she spoke of it as a sturdy,

gallant feat.

“The doctors told me”—her voice sang on a confidential note—“that

if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he

would have been physically _shattered_, my dear, and in his

_grave_—long in his grave.”

Amory winced, and wondered how this would have sounded to Froggy

Parker.

“Yes,” continued Beatrice tragically, “I had dreams—wonderful

visions.” She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. “I

saw bronze rivers lapping marble shores, and great birds that

soared through the air, parti-colored birds with iridescent

plumage. I heard strange music and the flare of barbaric

trumpets—what?”

Amory had snickered.

“What, Amory?”

“I said go on, Beatrice.”

“That was all—it merely recurred and recurred—gardens that

flaunted coloring against which this would be quite dull, moons

that whirled and swayed, paler than winter moons, more golden

than harvest moons—”

“Are you quite well now, Beatrice?”

“Quite well—as well as I will ever be. I am not understood,

Amory. I know that can’t express it to you, Amory, but—I am not

understood.”

Amory was quite moved. He put his arm around his mother, rubbing

his head gently against her shoulder.

“Poor Beatrice—poor Beatrice.”

“Tell me about _you_, Amory. Did you have two _horrible_ years?”

Amory considered lying, and then decided against it.

“No, Beatrice. I enjoyed them. I adapted myself to the

bourgeoisie. I became conventional.” He surprised himself by

saying that, and he pictured how Froggy would have gaped.

“Beatrice,” he said suddenly, “I want to go away to school.

Everybody in Minneapolis is going to go away to school.”

Beatrice showed some alarm.

“But you’re only fifteen.”

“Yes, but everybody goes away to school at fifteen, and I _want_

to, Beatrice.”

On Beatrice’s suggestion the subject was dropped for the rest of

the walk, but a week later she delighted him by saying:

“Amory, I have decided to let you have your way. If you still

want to, you can go to school.”

“Yes?”

“To St. Regis’s in Connecticut.”

Amory felt a quick excitement.

“It’s being arranged,” continued Beatrice. “It’s better that you

should go away. I’d have preferred you to have gone to Eton, and

then to Christ Church, Oxford, but it seems impracticable now—and

for the present we’ll let the university question take care of

itself.”

“What are you going to do, Beatrice?”

“Heaven knows. It seems my fate to fret away my years in this

country. Not for a second do I regret being American—indeed, I

think that a regret typical of very vulgar people, and I feel

sure we are the great coming nation—yet”—and she sighed—“I feel

my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower

civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns—”

Amory did not answer, so his mother continued:

“My regret is that you haven’t been abroad, but still, as you are

a man, it’s better that you should grow up here under the

snarling eagle—is that the right term?”

Amory agreed that it was. She would not have appreciated the

Japanese invasion.

“When do I go to school?”

“Next month. You’ll have to start East a little early to take

your examinations. After that you’ll have a free week, so I want

you to go up the Hudson and pay a visit.”

“To who?”

“To Monsignor Darcy, Amory. He wants to see you. He went to

Harrow and then to Yale—became a Catholic. I want him to talk to

you—I feel he can be such a help—” She stroked his auburn hair

gently. “Dear Amory, dear Amory—”

“Dear Beatrice—”

So early in September Amory, provided with “six suits summer

underwear, six suits winter underwear, one sweater or T shirt,

one jersey, one overcoat, winter, etc.,” set out for New England,

the land of schools.

There were Andover and Exeter with their memories of New England

dead—large, college-like democracies; St. Mark’s, Groton, St.

Regis’—recruited from Boston and the Knickerbocker families of

New York; St. Paul’s, with its great rinks; Pomfret and St.

George’s, prosperous and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which

prepared the wealth of the Middle West for social success at

Yale; Pawling, Westminster, Choate, Kent, and a hundred others;

all milling out their well-set-up, conventional, impressive type,

year after year; their mental stimulus the college entrance

exams; their vague purpose set forth in a hundred circulars as

“To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training as a

Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting the problems of

his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation in the

Arts and Sciences.”

At St. Regis’ Amory stayed three days and took his exams with a

scoffing confidence, then doubling back to New York to pay his

tutelary visit. The metropolis, barely glimpsed, made little

impression on him, except for the sense of cleanliness he drew

from the tall white buildings seen from a Hudson River steamboat

in the early morning. Indeed, his mind was so crowded with dreams

of athletic prowess at school that he considered this visit only

as a rather tiresome prelude to the great adventure. This,

however, it did not prove to be.

Monsignor Darcy’s house was an ancient, rambling structure set on

a hill overlooking the river, and there lived its owner, between

his trips to all parts of the Roman-Catholic world, rather like

an exiled Stuart king waiting to be called to the rule of his

land. Monsignor was forty-four then, and bustling—a trifle too

stout for symmetry, with hair the color of spun gold, and a

brilliant, enveloping personality. When he came into a room clad

in his full purple regalia from thatch to toe, he resembled a

Turner sunset, and attracted both admiration and attention. He

had written two novels: one of them violently anti-Catholic, just

before his conversion, and five years later another, in which he

had attempted to turn all his clever jibes against Catholics into

even cleverer innuendoes against Episcopalians. He was intensely

ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough

to be a celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.

Children adored him because he was like a child; youth revelled

in his company because he was still a youth, and couldn’t be

shocked. In the proper land and century he might have been a

Richelieu—at present he was a very moral, very religious (if not

particularly pious) clergyman, making a great mystery about

pulling rusty wires, and appreciating life to the fullest, if not

entirely enjoying it.

He and Amory took to each other at first sight—the jovial,

impressive prelate who could dazzle an embassy ball, and the

green-eyed, intent youth, in his first long trousers, accepted in

their own minds a relation of father and son within a half-hour’s

conversation.

“My dear boy, I’ve been waiting to see you for years. Take a big

chair and we’ll have a chat.”

“I’ve just come from school—St. Regis’s, you know.”

“So your mother says—a remarkable woman; have a cigarette—I’m

sure you smoke. Well, if you’re like me, you loathe all science

and mathematics—”

Amory nodded vehemently.

“Hate ’em all. Like English and history.”

“Of course. You’ll hate school for a while, too, but I’m glad

you’re going to St. Regis’s.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a gentleman’s school, and democracy won’t hit you

so early. You’ll find plenty of that in college.”

“I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I

think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all

Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

Monsignor chuckled.

“I’m one, you know.”

“Oh, you’re different—I think of Princeton as being lazy and

good-looking and aristocratic—you know, like a spring day.

Harvard seems sort of indoors—”

“And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor.

“That’s it.”

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never

recovered.

“I was for Bonnie Prince Charlie,” announced Amory.

“Of course you were—and for Hannibal—”

“Yes, and for the Southern Confederacy.” He was rather sceptical

about being an Irish patriot—he suspected that being Irish was

being somewhat common—but Monsignor assured him that Ireland was

a romantic lost cause and Irish people quite charming, and that

it should, by all means, be one of his principal biasses.

After a crowded hour which included several more cigarettes, and

during which Monsignor learned, to his surprise but not to his

horror, that Amory had not been brought up a Catholic, he

announced that he had another guest. This turned out to be the

Honorable Thornton Hancock, of Boston, ex-minister to The Hague,

author of an erudite history of the Middle Ages and the last of a

distinguished, patriotic, and brilliant family.

“He comes here for a rest,” said Monsignor confidentially,

treating Amory as a contemporary. “I act as an escape from the

weariness of agnosticism, and I think I’m the only man who knows

how his staid old mind is really at sea and longs for a sturdy

spar like the Church to cling to.”

Their first luncheon was one of the memorable events of Amory’s

early life. He was quite radiant and gave off a peculiar

brightness and charm. Monsignor called out the best that he had

thought by question and suggestion, and Amory talked with an

ingenious brilliance of a thousand impulses and desires and

repulsions and faiths and fears. He and Monsignor held the floor,

and the older man, with his less receptive, less accepting, yet

certainly not colder mentality, seemed content to listen and bask

in the mellow sunshine that played between these two. Monsignor

gave the effect of sunlight to many people; Amory gave it in his

youth and, to some extent, when he was very much older, but never

again was it quite so mutually spontaneous.

“He’s a radiant boy,” thought Thornton Hancock, who had seen the

splendor of two continents and talked with Parnell and Gladstone

and Bismarck—and afterward he added to Monsignor: “But his

education ought not to be intrusted to a school or college.”

But for the next four years the best of Amory’s intellect was

concentrated on matters of popularity, the intricacies of a

university social system and American Society as represented by

Biltmore Teas and Hot Springs golf-links.

... In all, a wonderful week, that saw Amory’s mind turned inside

out, a hundred of his theories confirmed, and his joy of life

crystallized to a thousand ambitions. Not that the conversation

was scholastic—heaven forbid! Amory had only the vaguest idea as

to what Bernard Shaw was—but Monsignor made quite as much out of

“The Beloved Vagabond” and “Sir Nigel,” taking good care that

Amory never once felt out of his depth.

But the trumpets were sounding for Amory’s preliminary skirmish

with his own generation.

“You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home

is where we are not,” said Monsignor.

“I _am_ sorry—”

“No, you’re not. No one person in the world is necessary to you

or to me.”

“Well—”

“Good-by.”

THE EGOTIST DOWN

Amory’s two years at St. Regis’, though in turn painful and

triumphant, had as little real significance in his own life as

the American “prep” school, crushed as it is under the heel of

the universities, has to American life in general. We have no

Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class; we

have, instead, clean, flaccid and innocuous preparatory schools.

He went all wrong at the start, was generally considered both

conceited and arrogant, and universally detested. He played

football intensely, alternating a reckless brilliancy with a

tendency to keep himself as safe from hazard as decency would

permit. In a wild panic he backed out of a fight with a boy his

own size, to a chorus of scorn, and a week later, in desperation,

picked a battle with another boy very much bigger, from which he

emerged badly beaten, but rather proud of himself.

He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and

this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work,

exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and

imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading

after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few

friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school,

he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which

he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was

unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.

There were some few grains of comfort. Whenever Amory was

submerged, his vanity was the last part to go below the surface,

so he could still enjoy a comfortable glow when “Wookey-wookey,”

the deaf old housekeeper, told him that he was the best-looking

boy she had ever seen. It had pleased him to be the lightest and

youngest man on the first football squad; it pleased him when

Doctor Dougall told him at the end of a heated conference that he

could, if he wished, get the best marks in school. But Doctor

Dougall was wrong. It was temperamentally impossible for Amory to

get the best marks in school.

Miserable, confined to bounds, unpopular with both faculty and

students—that was Amory’s first term. But at Christmas he had

returned to Minneapolis, tight-lipped and strangely jubilant.

“Oh, I was sort of fresh at first,” he told Frog Parker

patronizingly, “but I got along fine—lightest man on the squad.

You ought to go away to school, Froggy. It’s great stuff.”

INCIDENT OF THE WELL-MEANING PROFESSOR

On the last night of his first term, Mr. Margotson, the senior

master, sent word to study hall that Amory was to come to his

room at nine. Amory suspected that advice was forthcoming, but he

determined to be courteous, because this Mr. Margotson had been

kindly disposed toward him.

His summoner received him gravely, and motioned him to a chair.

He hemmed several times and looked consciously kind, as a man

will when he knows he’s on delicate ground.

“Amory,” he began. “I’ve sent for you on a personal matter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve noticed you this year and I—I like you. I think you have in

you the makings of a—a very good man.”

“Yes, sir,” Amory managed to articulate. He hated having people

talk as if he were an admitted failure.

“But I’ve noticed,” continued the older man blindly, “that you’re

not very popular with the boys.”

“No, sir.” Amory licked his lips.

“Ah—I thought you might not understand exactly what it was

they—ah—objected to. I’m going to tell you, because I

believe—ah—that when a boy knows his difficulties he’s better

able to cope with them—to conform to what others expect of him.”

He a-hemmed again with delicate reticence, and continued: “They

seem to think that you’re—ah—rather too fresh—”

Amory could stand no more. He rose from his chair, scarcely

controlling his voice when he spoke.

“I know—oh, _don’t_ you s’pose I know.” His voice rose. “I know

what they think; do you s’pose you have to _tell_ me!” He paused.

“I’m—I’ve got to go back now—hope I’m not rude—”

He left the room hurriedly. In the cool air outside, as he walked

to his house, he exulted in his refusal to be helped.

“That _damn_ old fool!” he cried wildly. “As if I didn’t _know!_”

He decided, however, that this was a good excuse not to go back

to study hall that night, so, comfortably couched up in his room,

he munched Nabiscos and finished “The White Company.”

INCIDENT OF THE WONDERFUL GIRL

There was a bright star in February. New York burst upon him on

Washington’s Birthday with the brilliance of a long-anticipated

event. His glimpse of it as a vivid whiteness against a deep-blue

sky had left a picture of splendor that rivalled the dream cities

in the Arabian Nights; but this time he saw it by electric light,

and romance gleamed from the chariot-race sign on Broadway and

from the women’s eyes at the Astor, where he and young Paskert

from St. Regis’ had dinner. When they walked down the aisle of

the theatre, greeted by the nervous twanging and discord of

untuned violins and the sensuous, heavy fragrance of paint and

powder, he moved in a sphere of epicurean delight. Everything

enchanted him. The play was “The Little Millionaire,” with George

M. Cohan, and there was one stunning young brunette who made him

sit with brimming eyes in the ecstasy of watching her dance.

“Oh—you—wonderful girl, What a wonderful girl you are—”

sang the tenor, and Amory agreed silently, but passionately.

“All—your—wonderful words Thrill me through—”

The violins swelled and quavered on the last notes, the girl sank

to a crumpled butterfly on the stage, a great burst of clapping

filled the house. Oh, to fall in love like that, to the

languorous magic melody of such a tune!

The last scene was laid on a roof-garden, and the cellos sighed

to the musical moon, while light adventure and facile froth-like

comedy flitted back and forth in the calcium. Amory was on fire

to be an habitui of roof-gardens, to meet a girl who should look

like that—better, that very girl; whose hair would be drenched

with golden moonlight, while at his elbow sparkling wine was

poured by an unintelligible waiter. When the curtain fell for the

last time he gave such a long sigh that the people in front of

him twisted around and stared and said loud enough for him to

hear:

“What a _remarkable_-looking boy!”

This took his mind off the play, and he wondered if he really did

seem handsome to the population of New York.

Paskert and he walked in silence toward their hotel. The former

was the first to speak. His uncertain fifteen-year-old voice

broke in in a melancholy strain on Amory’s musings:

“I’d marry that girl to-night.”

There was no need to ask what girl he referred to.

“I’d be proud to take her home and introduce her to my people,”

continued Paskert.

Amory was distinctly impressed. He wished he had said it instead

of Paskert. It sounded so mature.

“I wonder about actresses; are they all pretty bad?”

“No, _sir_, not by a darn sight,” said the worldly youth with

emphasis, “and I know that girl’s as good as gold. I can tell.”

They wandered on, mixing in the Broadway crowd, dreaming on the

music that eddied out of the cafes. New faces flashed on and off

like myriad lights, pale or rouged faces, tired, yet sustained by

a weary excitement. Amory watched them in fascination. He was

planning his life. He was going to live in New York, and be known

at every restaurant and cafe, wearing a dress-suit from early

evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the

forenoon.

“Yes, _sir_, I’d marry that girl to-night!”

HEROIC IN GENERAL TONE

October of his second and last year at St. Regis’ was a high

point in Amory’s memory. The game with Groton was played from

three of a snappy, exhilarating afternoon far into the crisp

autumnal twilight, and Amory at quarter-back, exhorting in wild

despair, making impossible tackles, calling signals in a voice

that had diminished to a hoarse, furious whisper, yet found time

to revel in the blood-stained bandage around his head, and the

straining, glorious heroism of plunging, crashing bodies and

aching limbs. For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of

the November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, one with the

sea-rover on the prow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and

Horatius, Sir Nigel and Ted Coy, scraped and stripped into trim

and then flung by his own will into the breach, beating back the

tide, hearing from afar the thunder of cheers... finally bruised

and weary, but still elusive, circling an end, twisting, changing

pace, straight-arming... falling behind the Groton goal with two

men on his legs, in the only touchdown of the game.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SLICKER

From the scoffing superiority of sixth-form year and success

Amory looked back with cynical wonder on his status of the year

before. He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever

be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in

Minneapolis—these had been his ingredients when he entered St.

Regis’. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay

to conceal the “Amory plus Beatrice” from the ferreting eyes of a

boarding-school, so St. Regis’ had very painfully drilled

Beatrice out of him, and begun to lay down new and more

conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St.

Regis’ and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this

fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for

which he had suffered, his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his

laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a

matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star

quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the St. Regis

Tattler: it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys

imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been

contemptible weaknesses.

After the football season he slumped into dreamy content. The

night of the pre-holiday dance he slipped away and went early to

bed for the pleasure of hearing the violin music cross the grass

and come surging in at his window. Many nights he lay there

dreaming awake of secret cafes in Mont Martre, where ivory women

delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of

fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air

was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.

In the spring he read “L’Allegro,” by request, and was inspired

to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes of

Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that

he might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an

apple-tree near the sixth-form house. Seating himself in this he

would pump higher and higher until he got the effect of swinging

into the wide air, into a fairyland of piping satyrs and nymphs

with the faces of fair-haired girls he passed in the streets of

Eastchester. As the swing reached its highest point, Arcady

really lay just over the brow of a certain hill, where the brown

road dwindled out of sight in a golden dot.

He read voluminously all spring, the beginning of his eighteenth

year: “The Gentleman from Indiana,” “The New Arabian Nights,”

“The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” “The Man Who Was Thursday,” which

he liked without understanding; “Stover at Yale,” that became

somewhat of a text-book; “Dombey and Son,” because he thought he

really should read better stuff; Robert Chambers, David Graham

Phillips, and E. Phillips Oppenheim complete, and a scattering of

Tennyson and Kipling. Of all his class work only “L’Allegro” and

some quality of rigid clarity in solid geometry stirred his

languid interest.

As June drew near, he felt the need of conversation to formulate

his own ideas, and, to his surprise, found a co-philosopher in

Rahill, the president of the sixth form. In many a talk, on the

highroad or lying belly-down along the edge of the baseball

diamond, or late at night with their cigarettes glowing in the

dark, they threshed out the questions of school, and there was

developed the term “slicker.”

“Got tobacco?” whispered Rahill one night, putting his head

inside the door five minutes after lights.

“Sure.”

“I’m coming in.”

“Take a couple of pillows and lie in the window-seat, why don’t

you.”

Amory sat up in bed and lit a cigarette while Rahill settled for

a conversation. Rahill’s favorite subject was the respective

futures of the sixth form, and Amory never tired of outlining

them for his benefit.

“Ted Converse? ’At’s easy. He’ll fail his exams, tutor all summer

at Harstrum’s, get into Sheff with about four conditions, and

flunk out in the middle of the freshman year. Then he’ll go back

West and raise hell for a year or so; finally his father will

make him go into the paint business. He’ll marry and have four

sons, all bone heads. He’ll always think St. Regis’s spoiled him,

so he’ll send his sons to day school in Portland. He’ll die of

locomotor ataxia when he’s forty-one, and his wife will give a

baptizing stand or whatever you call it to the Presbyterian

Church, with his name on it—”

“Hold up, Amory. That’s too darned gloomy. How about yourself?”

“I’m in a superior class. You are, too. We’re philosophers.”

“I’m not.”

“Sure you are. You’ve got a darn good head on you.” But Amory

knew that nothing in the abstract, no theory or generality, ever

moved Rahill until he stubbed his toe upon the concrete minutiae

of it.

“Haven’t,” insisted Rahill. “I let people impose on me here and

don’t get anything out of it. I’m the prey of my friends, damn

it—do their lessons, get ’em out of trouble, pay ’em stupid

summer visits, and always entertain their kid sisters; keep my

temper when they get selfish and then they think they pay me back

by voting for me and telling me I’m the ‘big man’ of St. Regis’s.

I want to get where everybody does their own work and I can tell

people where to go. I’m tired of being nice to every poor fish in

school.”

“You’re not a slicker,” said Amory suddenly.

“A what?”

“A slicker.”

“What the devil’s that?”

“Well, it’s something that—that—there’s a lot of them. You’re not

one, and neither am I, though I am more than you are.”

“Who is one? What makes you one?”

Amory considered.

“Why—why, I suppose that the _sign_ of it is when a fellow slicks

his hair back with water.”

“Like Carstairs?”

“Yes—sure. He’s a slicker.”

They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker

was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains,

that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to

get ahead, be popular, admired, and never in trouble. He dressed

well, was particularly neat in appearance, and derived his name

from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in

water or tonic, parted in the middle, and slicked back as the

current of fashion dictated. The slickers of that year had

adopted tortoise-shell spectacles as badges of their slickerhood,

and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill

never missed one. The slicker seemed distributed through school,

always a little wiser and shrewder than his contemporaries,

managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully

concealed.

Amory found the slicker a most valuable classification until his

junior year in college, when the outline became so blurred and

indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became

only a quality. Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker

qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains

and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was

quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.

This was a first real break from the hypocrisy of school

tradition. The slicker was a definite element of success,

differing intrinsically from the prep school “big man.”

“THE SLICKER”

1. Clever sense of social values.

2. Dresses well. Pretends that dress is superficial—but knows that it

isn’t.

3. Goes into such activities as he can shine in.

4. Gets to college and is, in a worldly way, successful.

5. Hair slicked.

“THE BIG MAN”

1. Inclined to stupidity and unconscious of social values.

2. Thinks dress is superficial, and is inclined to be careless about

it.

3. Goes out for everything from a sense of duty.

4. Gets to college and has a problematical future. Feels lost without

his circle, and always says that school days were happiest, after all.

Goes back to school and makes speeches about what St. Regis’s boys

are doing.

5. Hair not slicked.

Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would

be the only boy entering that year from St. Regis’. Yale had a

romance and glamour from the tales of Minneapolis, and St. Regis’

men who had been “tapped for Skull and Bones,” but Princeton drew

him most, with its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring

reputation as the pleasantest country club in America. Dwarfed by

the menacing college exams, Amory’s school days drifted into the

past. Years afterward, when he went back to St. Regis’, he seemed

to have forgotten the successes of sixth-form year, and to be

able to picture himself only as the unadjustable boy who had

hurried down corridors, jeered at by his rabid contemporaries mad

with common sense.

CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles

At first Amory noticed only the wealth of sunshine creeping

across the long, green swards, dancing on the leaded

window-panes, and swimming around the tops of spires and towers

and battlemented walls. Gradually he realized that he was really

walking up University Place, self-conscious about his suitcase,

developing a new tendency to glare straight ahead when he passed

any one. Several times he could have sworn that men turned to

look at him critically. He wondered vaguely if there was

something the matter with his clothes, and wished he had shaved

that morning on the train. He felt unnecessarily stiff and

awkward among these white-flannelled, bareheaded youths, who must

be juniors and seniors, judging from the savoir faire with which

they strolled.

He found that 12 University Place was a large, dilapidated

mansion, at present apparently uninhabited, though he knew it

housed usually a dozen freshmen. After a hurried skirmish with

his landlady he sallied out on a tour of exploration, but he had

gone scarcely a block when he became horribly conscious that he

must be the only man in town who was wearing a hat. He returned

hurriedly to 12 University, left his derby, and, emerging

bareheaded, loitered down Nassau Street, stopping to investigate

a display of athletic photographs in a store window, including a

large one of Allenby, the football captain, and next attracted by

the sign “Jigger Shop” over a confectionary window. This sounded

familiar, so he sauntered in and took a seat on a high stool.

“Chocolate sundae,” he told a colored person.

“Double chocolate jiggah? Anything else?”

“Why—yes.”

“Bacon bun?”

“Why—yes.”

He munched four of these, finding them of pleasing savor, and

then consumed another double-chocolate jigger before ease

descended upon him. After a cursory inspection of the

pillow-cases, leather pennants, and Gibson Girls that lined the

walls, he left, and continued along Nassau Street with his hands

in his pockets. Gradually he was learning to distinguish between

upper classmen and entering men, even though the freshman cap

would not appear until the following Monday. Those who were too

obviously, too nervously at home were freshmen, for as each train

brought a new contingent it was immediately absorbed into the

hatless, white-shod, book-laden throng, whose function seemed to

be to drift endlessly up and down the street, emitting great

clouds of smoke from brand-new pipes. By afternoon Amory realized

that now the newest arrivals were taking him for an upper

classman, and he tried conscientiously to look both pleasantly

blasé and casually critical, which was as near as he could

analyze the prevalent facial expression.

At five o’clock he felt the need of hearing his own voice, so he

retreated to his house to see if any one else had arrived. Having

climbed the rickety stairs he scrutinized his room resignedly,

concluding that it was hopeless to attempt any more inspired

decoration than class banners and tiger pictures. There was a tap

at the door.

“Come in!”

A slim face with gray eyes and a humorous smile appeared in the

doorway.

“Got a hammer?”

“No—sorry. Maybe Mrs. Twelve, or whatever she goes by, has one.”

The stranger advanced into the room.

“You an inmate of this asylum?”

Amory nodded.

“Awful barn for the rent we pay.”

Amory had to agree that it was.

“I thought of the campus,” he said, “but they say there’s so few

freshmen that they’re lost. Have to sit around and study for

something to do.”

The gray-eyed man decided to introduce himself.

“My name’s Holiday.”

“Blaine’s my name.”

They shook hands with the fashionable low swoop. Amory grinned.

“Where’d you prep?”

“Andover—where did you?”

“St. Regis’s.”

“Oh, did you? I had a cousin there.”

They discussed the cousin thoroughly, and then Holiday announced

that he was to meet his brother for dinner at six.

“Come along and have a bite with us.”

“All right.”

At the Kenilworth Amory met Burne Holiday—he of the gray eyes was

Kerry—and during a limpid meal of thin soup and anaemic

vegetables they stared at the other freshmen, who sat either in

small groups looking very ill at ease, or in large groups seeming

very much at home.

“I hear Commons is pretty bad,” said Amory.

“That’s the rumor. But you’ve got to eat there—or pay anyways.”

“Crime!”

“Imposition!”

“Oh, at Princeton you’ve got to swallow everything the first

year. It’s like a damned prep school.”

Amory agreed.

“Lot of pep, though,” he insisted. “I wouldn’t have gone to Yale

for a million.”

“Me either.”

“You going out for anything?” inquired Amory of the elder

brother.

“Not me—Burne here is going out for the Prince—the Daily

Princetonian, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You going out for anything?”

“Why—yes. I’m going to take a whack at freshman football.”

“Play at St. Regis’s?”

“Some,” admitted Amory depreciatingly, “but I’m getting so damned

thin.”

“You’re not thin.”

“Well, I used to be stocky last fall.”

“Oh!”

After supper they attended the movies, where Amory was fascinated

by the glib comments of a man in front of him, as well as by the

wild yelling and shouting.

“Yoho!”

“Oh, honey-baby—you’re so big and strong, but oh, so gentle!”

“Clinch!”

“Oh, Clinch!”

“Kiss her, kiss ’at lady, quick!”

“Oh-h-h—!”

A group began whistling “By the Sea,” and the audience took it up

noisily. This was followed by an indistinguishable song that

included much stamping and then by an endless, incoherent dirge.

“Oh-h-h-h-h She works in a Jam Factoree And—that-may-be-all-right

But you can’t-fool-me For I know—DAMN—WELL That she

DON’T-make-jam-all-night! Oh-h-h-h!”

As they pushed out, giving and receiving curious impersonal

glances, Amory decided that he liked the movies, wanted to enjoy

them as the row of upper classmen in front had enjoyed them, with

their arms along the backs of the seats, their comments Gaelic

and caustic, their attitude a mixture of critical wit and

tolerant amusement.

“Want a sundae—I mean a jigger?” asked Kerry.

“Sure.”

They suppered heavily and then, still sauntering, eased back to

12.

“Wonderful night.”

“It’s a whiz.”

“You men going to unpack?”

“Guess so. Come on, Burne.”

Amory decided to sit for a while on the front steps, so he bade

them good night.

The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the

last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches

with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the

gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a

hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.

He remembered that an alumnus of the nineties had told him of one

of Booth Tarkington’s amusements: standing in mid-campus in the

small hours and singing tenor songs to the stars, arousing

mingled emotions in the couched undergraduates according to the

sentiment of their moods.

Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place a white-clad

phalanx broke the gloom, and marching figures, white-shirted,

white-trousered, swung rhythmically up the street, with linked

arms and heads thrown back:

“Going back—going back, Going—back—to—Nas-sau—Hall, Going back—going

back— To the—Best—Old—Place—of—All. Going back—going back, From

all—this—earth-ly—ball, We’ll—clear—the—track—as—we—go—back—

Going—back—to—Nas-sau—Hall!”

Amory closed his eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The

song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who

bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and

relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his

eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil the rich illusion of

harmony.

He sighed eagerly. There at the head of the white platoon marched

Allenby, the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that

this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his

hundred-and-sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory

through the heavy blue and crimson lines.

Fascinated, Amory watched each rank of linked arms as it came

abreast, the faces indistinct above the polo shirts, the voices

blent in a paean of triumph—and then the procession passed

through shadowy Campbell Arch, and the voices grew fainter as it

wound eastward over the campus.

The minutes passed and Amory sat there very quietly. He regretted

the rule that would forbid freshmen to be outdoors after curfew,

for he wanted to ramble through the shadowy scented lanes, where

Witherspoon brooded like a dark mother over Whig and Clio, her

Attic children, where the black Gothic snake of Little curled

down to Cuyler and Patton, these in turn flinging the mystery out

over the placid slope rolling to the lake.

Princeton of the daytime filtered slowly into his

consciousness—West and Reunion, redolent of the sixties,

Seventy-nine Hall, brick-red and arrogant, Upper and Lower Pyne,

aristocratic Elizabethan ladies not quite content to live among

shopkeepers, and, topping all, climbing with clear blue

aspiration, the great dreaming spires of Holder and Cleveland

towers.

From the first he loved Princeton—its lazy beauty, its

half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the

rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds, and under it

all the air of struggle that pervaded his class. From the day

when, wild-eyed and exhausted, the jerseyed freshmen sat in the

gymnasium and elected some one from Hill School class president,

a Lawrenceville celebrity vice-president, a hockey star from St.

Paul’s secretary, up until the end of sophomore year it never

ceased, that breathless social system, that worship, seldom

named, never really admitted, of the bogey “Big Man.”

First it was schools, and Amory, alone from St. Regis’, watched

the crowds form and widen and form again; St. Paul’s, Hill,

Pomfret, eating at certain tacitly reserved tables in Commons,

dressing in their own corners of the gymnasium, and drawing

unconsciously about them a barrier of the slightly less important

but socially ambitious to protect them from the friendly, rather

puzzled high-school element. From the moment he realized this

Amory resented social barriers as artificial distinctions made by

the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the

almost strong.

Having decided to be one of the gods of the class, he reported

for freshman football practice, but in the second week, playing

quarter-back, already paragraphed in corners of the Princetonian,

he wrenched his knee seriously enough to put him out for the rest

of the season. This forced him to retire and consider the

situation.

“12 Univee” housed a dozen miscellaneous question-marks. There

were three or four inconspicuous and quite startled boys from

Lawrenceville, two amateur wild men from a New York private

school (Kerry Holiday christened them the “plebeian drunks”), a

Jewish youth, also from New York, and, as compensation for Amory,

the two Holidays, to whom he took an instant fancy.

The Holidays were rumored twins, but really the dark-haired one,

Kerry, was a year older than his blond brother, Burne. Kerry was

tall, with humorous gray eyes, and a sudden, attractive smile; he

became at once the mentor of the house, reaper of ears that grew

too high, censor of conceit, vendor of rare, satirical humor.

Amory spread the table of their future friendship with all his

ideas of what college should and did mean. Kerry, not inclined as

yet to take things seriously, chided him gently for being curious

at this inopportune time about the intricacies of the social

system, but liked him and was both interested and amused.

Burne, fair-haired, silent, and intent, appeared in the house

only as a busy apparition, gliding in quietly at night and off

again in the early morning to get up his work in the library—he

was out for the Princetonian, competing furiously against forty

others for the coveted first place. In December he came down with

diphtheria, and some one else won the competition, but, returning

to college in February, he dauntlessly went after the prize

again. Necessarily, Amory’s acquaintance with him was in the way

of three-minute chats, walking to and from lectures, so he failed

to penetrate Burne’s one absorbing interest and find what lay

beneath it.

Amory was far from contented. He missed the place he had won at

St. Regis’, the being known and admired, yet Princeton stimulated

him, and there were many things ahead calculated to arouse the

Machiavelli latent in him, could he but insert a wedge. The

upper-class clubs, concerning which he had pumped a reluctant

graduate during the previous summer, excited his curiosity: Ivy,

detached and breathlessly aristocratic; Cottage, an impressive

mélange of brilliant adventurers and well-dressed philanderers;

Tiger Inn, broad-shouldered and athletic, vitalized by an honest

elaboration of prep-school standards; Cap and Gown,

anti-alcoholic, faintly religious and politically powerful;

flamboyant Colonial; literary Quadrangle; and the dozen others,

varying in age and position.

Anything which brought an under classman into too glaring a light

was labelled with the damning brand of “running it out.” The

movies thrived on caustic comments, but the men who made them

were generally running it out; talking of clubs was running it

out; standing for anything very strongly, as, for instance,

drinking parties or teetotalling, was running it out; in short,

being personally conspicuous was not tolerated, and the

influential man was the non-committal man, until at club

elections in sophomore year every one should be sewed up in some

bag for the rest of his college career.

Amory found that writing for the Nassau Literary Magazine would

get him nothing, but that being on the board of the Daily

Princetonian would get any one a good deal. His vague desire to

do immortal acting with the English Dramatic Association faded

out when he found that the most ingenious brains and talents were

concentrated upon the Triangle Club, a musical comedy

organization that every year took a great Christmas trip. In the

meanwhile, feeling strangely alone and restless in Commons, with

new desires and ambitions stirring in his mind, he let the first

term go by between an envy of the embryo successes and a puzzled

fretting with Kerry as to why they were not accepted immediately

among the elite of the class.

Many afternoons they lounged in the windows of 12 Univee and

watched the class pass to and from Commons, noting satellites

already attaching themselves to the more prominent, watching the

lonely grind with his hurried step and downcast eye, envying the

happy security of the big school groups.

“We’re the damned middle class, that’s what!” he complained to

Kerry one day as he lay stretched out on the sofa, consuming a

family of Fatimas with contemplative precision.

“Well, why not? We came to Princeton so we could feel that way

toward the small colleges—have it on ’em, more self-confidence,

dress better, cut a swathe—”

“Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted

Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh,

Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.”

“But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”

Amory lay for a moment without speaking.

“I won’t be—long,” he said finally. “But I hate to get anywhere

by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.”

“Honorable scars.” Kerry craned his neck suddenly at the street.

“There’s Langueduc, if you want to see what he looks like—and

Humbird just behind.”

Amory rose dynamically and sought the windows.

“Oh,” he said, scrutinizing these worthies, “Humbird looks like a

knock-out, but this Langueduc—he’s the rugged type, isn’t he? I

distrust that sort. All diamonds look big in the rough.”

“Well,” said Kerry, as the excitement subsided, “you’re a

literary genius. It’s up to you.”

“I wonder”—Amory paused—“if I could be. I honestly think so

sometimes. That sounds like the devil, and I wouldn’t say it to

anybody except you.”

“Well—go ahead. Let your hair grow and write poems like this guy

D’Invilliers in the Lit.”

Amory reached lazily at a pile of magazines on the table.

“Read his latest effort?”

“Never miss ’em. They’re rare.”

Amory glanced through the issue.

“Hello!” he said in surprise, “he’s a freshman, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Listen to this! My God!

“‘A serving lady speaks: Black velvet trails its folds over the day,

White tapers, prisoned in their silver frames, Wave their thin flames

like shadows in the wind, Pia, Pompia, come—come away—’

“Now, what the devil does that mean?”

“It’s a pantry scene.”

“‘Her toes are stiffened like a stork’s in flight; She’s laid upon

her bed, on the white sheets, Her hands pressed on her smooth bust

like a saint, Bella Cunizza, come into the light!’

“My gosh, Kerry, what in hell is it all about? I swear I don’t

get him at all, and I’m a literary bird myself.”

“It’s pretty tricky,” said Kerry, “only you’ve got to think of

hearses and stale milk when you read it. That isn’t as pash as

some of them.”

Amory tossed the magazine on the table.

“Well,” he sighed, “I sure am up in the air. I know I’m not a

regular fellow, yet I loathe anybody else that isn’t. I can’t

decide whether to cultivate my mind and be a great dramatist, or

to thumb my nose at the Golden Treasury and be a Princeton

slicker.”

“Why decide?” suggested Kerry. “Better drift, like me. I’m going

to sail into prominence on Burne’s coat-tails.”

“I can’t drift—I want to be interested. I want to pull strings,

even for somebody else, or be Princetonian chairman or Triangle

president. I want to be admired, Kerry.”

“You’re thinking too much about yourself.”

Amory sat up at this.

“No. I’m thinking about you, too. We’ve got to get out and mix

around the class right now, when it’s fun to be a snob. I’d like

to bring a sardine to the prom in June, for instance, but I

wouldn’t do it unless I could be damn debonaire about

it—introduce her to all the prize parlor-snakes, and the football

captain, and all that simple stuff.”

“Amory,” said Kerry impatiently, “you’re just going around in a

circle. If you want to be prominent, get out and try for

something; if you don’t, just take it easy.” He yawned. “Come on,

let’s let the smoke drift off. We’ll go down and watch football

practice.”

Amory gradually accepted this point of view, decided that next

fall would inaugurate his career, and relinquished himself to

watching Kerry extract joy from 12 Univee.

They filled the Jewish youth’s bed with lemon pie; they put out

the gas all over the house every night by blowing into the jet in

Amory’s room, to the bewilderment of Mrs. Twelve and the local

plumber; they set up the effects of the plebeian drunks—pictures,

books, and furniture—in the bathroom, to the confusion of the

pair, who hazily discovered the transposition on their return

from a Trenton spree; they were disappointed beyond measure when

the plebeian drunks decided to take it as a joke; they played

red-dog and twenty-one and jackpot from dinner to dawn, and on

the occasion of one man’s birthday persuaded him to buy

sufficient champagne for a hilarious celebration. The donor of

the party having remained sober, Kerry and Amory accidentally

dropped him down two flights of stairs and called, shame-faced

and penitent, at the infirmary all the following week.

“Say, who are all these women?” demanded Kerry one day,

protesting at the size of Amory’s mail. “I’ve been looking at the

postmarks lately—Farmington and Dobbs and Westover and Dana

Hall—what’s the idea?”

Amory grinned.

“All from the Twin Cities.” He named them off. “There’s Marylyn

De Witt—she’s pretty, got a car of her own and that’s damn

convenient; there’s Sally Weatherby—she’s getting too fat;

there’s Myra St. Claire, she’s an old flame, easy to kiss if you

like it—”

“What line do you throw ’em?” demanded Kerry. “I’ve tried

everything, and the mad wags aren’t even afraid of me.”

“You’re the ‘nice boy’ type,” suggested Amory.

“That’s just it. Mother always feels the girl is safe if she’s

with me. Honestly, it’s annoying. If I start to hold somebody’s

hand, they laugh at me, and let me, just as if it wasn’t part of

them. As soon as I get hold of a hand they sort of disconnect it

from the rest of them.”

“Sulk,” suggested Amory. “Tell ’em you’re wild and have ’em

reform you—go home furious—come back in half an hour—startle

’em.”

Kerry shook his head.

“No chance. I wrote a St. Timothy girl a really loving letter

last year. In one place I got rattled and said: ‘My God, how I

love you!’ She took a nail scissors, clipped out the ‘My God’ and

showed the rest of the letter all over school. Doesn’t work at

all. I’m just ‘good old Kerry’ and all that rot.”

Amory smiled and tried to picture himself as “good old Amory.” He

failed completely.

February dripped snow and rain, the cyclonic freshman mid-years

passed, and life in 12 Univee continued interesting if not

purposeful. Once a day Amory indulged in a club sandwich,

cornflakes, and Julienne potatoes at “Joe’s,” accompanied usually

by Kerry or Alec Connage. The latter was a quiet, rather aloof

slicker from Hotchkiss, who lived next door and shared the same

enforced singleness as Amory, due to the fact that his entire

class had gone to Yale. “Joe’s” was unaesthetic and faintly

unsanitary, but a limitless charge account could be opened there,

a convenience that Amory appreciated. His father had been

experimenting with mining stocks and, in consequence, his

allowance, while liberal, was not at all what he had expected.

“Joe’s” had the additional advantage of seclusion from curious

upper-class eyes, so at four each afternoon Amory, accompanied by

friend or book, went up to experiment with his digestion. One day

in March, finding that all the tables were occupied, he slipped

into a chair opposite a freshman who bent intently over a book at

the last table. They nodded briefly. For twenty minutes Amory sat

consuming bacon buns and reading “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” (he

had discovered Shaw quite by accident while browsing in the

library during mid-years); the other freshman, also intent on his

volume, meanwhile did away with a trio of chocolate malted milks.

By and by Amory’s eyes wandered curiously to his fellow-luncher’s

book. He spelled out the name and title upside down—“Marpessa,”

by Stephen Phillips. This meant nothing to him, his metrical

education having been confined to such Sunday classics as “Come

into the Garden, Maude,” and what morsels of Shakespeare and

Milton had been recently forced upon him.

Moved to address his vis-a-vis, he simulated interest in his book

for a moment, and then exclaimed aloud as if involuntarily:

“Ha! Great stuff!”

The other freshman looked up and Amory registered artificial

embarrassment.

“Are you referring to your bacon buns?” His cracked, kindly voice

went well with the large spectacles and the impression of a

voluminous keenness that he gave.

“No,” Amory answered. “I was referring to Bernard Shaw.” He

turned the book around in explanation.

“I’ve never read any Shaw. I’ve always meant to.” The boy paused

and then continued: “Did you ever read Stephen Phillips, or do

you like poetry?”

“Yes, indeed,” Amory affirmed eagerly. “I’ve never read much of

Phillips, though.” (He had never heard of any Phillips except the

late David Graham.)

“It’s pretty fair, I think. Of course he’s a Victorian.” They

sallied into a discussion of poetry, in the course of which they

introduced themselves, and Amory’s companion proved to be none

other than “that awful highbrow, Thomas Parke D’Invilliers,” who

signed the passionate love-poems in the Lit. He was, perhaps,

nineteen, with stooped shoulders, pale blue eyes, and, as Amory

could tell from his general appearance, without much conception

of social competition and such phenomena of absorbing interest.

Still, he liked books, and it seemed forever since Amory had met

any one who did; if only that St. Paul’s crowd at the next table

would not mistake _him_ for a bird, too, he would enjoy the

encounter tremendously. They didn’t seem to be noticing, so he

let himself go, discussed books by the dozens—books he had read,

read about, books he had never heard of, rattling off lists of

titles with the facility of a Brentano’s clerk. D’Invilliers was

partially taken in and wholly delighted. In a good-natured way he

had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines

and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could

mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands,

was rather a treat.

“Ever read any Oscar Wilde?” he asked.

“No. Who wrote it?”

“It’s a man—don’t you know?”

“Oh, surely.” A faint chord was struck in Amory’s memory. “Wasn’t

the comic opera, ‘Patience,’ written about him?”

“Yes, that’s the fella. I’ve just finished a book of his, ‘The

Picture of Dorian Gray,’ and I certainly wish you’d read it.

You’d like it. You can borrow it if you want to.”

“Why, I’d like it a lot—thanks.”

“Don’t you want to come up to the room? I’ve got a few other

books.”

Amory hesitated, glanced at the St. Paul’s group—one of them was

the magnificent, exquisite Humbird—and he considered how

determinate the addition of this friend would be. He never got to

the stage of making them and getting rid of them—he was not hard

enough for that—so he measured Thomas Parke D’Invilliers’

undoubted attractions and value against the menace of cold eyes

behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles that he fancied glared from the

next table.

“Yes, I’ll go.”

So he found “Dorian Gray” and the “Mystic and Somber Dolores” and

the “Belle Dame sans Merci”; for a month was keen on naught else.

The world became pale and interesting, and he tried hard to look

at Princeton through the satiated eyes of Oscar Wilde and

Swinburne—or “Fingal O’Flaherty” and “Algernon Charles,” as he

called them in precieuse jest. He read enormously every

night—Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge, Ernest

Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, Sudermann, Robert Hugh Benson, the

Savoy Operas—just a heterogeneous mixture, for he suddenly

discovered that he had read nothing for years.

Tom D’Invilliers became at first an occasion rather than a

friend. Amory saw him about once a week, and together they gilded

the ceiling of Tom’s room and decorated the walls with imitation

tapestry, bought at an auction, tall candlesticks and figured

curtains. Amory liked him for being clever and literary without

effeminacy or affectation. In fact, Amory did most of the

strutting and tried painfully to make every remark an epigram,

than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams, there are

many feats harder. 12 Univee was amused. Kerry read “Dorian Gray”

and simulated Lord Henry, following Amory about, addressing him

as “Dorian” and pretending to encourage in him wicked fancies and

attenuated tendencies to ennui. When he carried it into Commons,

to the amazement of the others at table, Amory became furiously

embarrassed, and after that made epigrams only before

D’Invilliers or a convenient mirror.

One day Tom and Amory tried reciting their own and Lord Dunsany’s

poems to the music of Kerry’s graphophone.

“Chant!” cried Tom. “Don’t recite! Chant!”

Amory, who was performing, looked annoyed, and claimed that he

needed a record with less piano in it. Kerry thereupon rolled on

the floor in stifled laughter.

“Put on ‘Hearts and Flowers’!” he howled. “Oh, my Lord, I’m going

to cast a kitten.”

“Shut off the damn graphophone,” Amory cried, rather red in the

face. “I’m not giving an exhibition.”

In the meanwhile Amory delicately kept trying to awaken a sense

of the social system in D’Invilliers, for he knew that this poet

was really more conventional than he, and needed merely watered

hair, a smaller range of conversation, and a darker brown hat to

become quite regular. But the liturgy of Livingstone collars and

dark ties fell on heedless ears; in fact D’Invilliers faintly

resented his efforts; so Amory confined himself to calls once a

week, and brought him occasionally to 12 Univee. This caused mild

titters among the other freshmen, who called them “Doctor Johnson

and Boswell.”

Alec Connage, another frequent visitor, liked him in a vague way,

but was afraid of him as a highbrow. Kerry, who saw through his

poetic patter to the solid, almost respectable depths within, was

immensely amused and would have him recite poetry by the hour,

while he lay with closed eyes on Amory’s sofa and listened:

“Asleep or waking is it? for her neck Kissed over close, wears yet a

purple speck Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out; Soft and

stung softly—fairer for a fleck...”

“That’s good,” Kerry would say softly. “It pleases the elder

Holiday. That’s a great poet, I guess.” Tom, delighted at an

audience, would ramble through the “Poems and Ballades” until

Kerry and Amory knew them almost as well as he.

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens

of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective

atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed

harmoniously above the willows. May came too soon, and suddenly

unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through

starlight and rain.

A DAMP SYMBOLIC INTERLUDE

The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the

spires and towers, and then settled below them, so that the

dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky.

Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as

shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls

and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed

suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint

squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell

boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial,

stretched himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool

bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time—time that had crept

so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so

intangible in the long spring twilights. Evening after evening

the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy

beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness

had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and

Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.

The tower that in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a

spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible

against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the

transiency and unimportance of the campus figures except as

holders of the apostolic succession. He liked knowing that Gothic

architecture, with its upward trend, was peculiarly appropriate

to universities, and the idea became personal to him. The silent

stretches of green, the quiet halls with an occasional

late-burning scholastic light held his imagination in a strong

grasp, and the chastity of the spire became a symbol of this

perception.

“Damn it all,” he whispered aloud, wetting his hands in the damp

and running them through his hair. “Next year I work!” Yet he

knew that where now the spirit of spires and towers made him

dreamily acquiescent, it would then overawe him. Where now he

realized only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware

of his own impotency and insufficiency.

The college dreamed on—awake. He felt a nervous excitement that

might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream

where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be

vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had given

nothing, he had taken nothing.

A belated freshman, his oilskin slicker rasping loudly, slushed

along the soft path. A voice from somewhere called the inevitable

formula, “Stick out your head!” below an unseen window. A hundred

little sounds of the current drifting on under the fog pressed in

finally on his consciousness.

“Oh, God!” he cried suddenly, and started at the sound of his

voice in the stillness. The rain dripped on. A minute longer he

lay without moving, his hands clinched. Then he sprang to his

feet and gave his clothes a tentative pat.

“I’m very damn wet!” he said aloud to the sun-dial.

HISTORICAL

The war began in the summer following his freshman year. Beyond a

sporting interest in the German dash for Paris the whole affair

failed either to thrill or interest him. With the attitude he

might have held toward an amusing melodrama he hoped it would be

long and bloody. If it had not continued he would have felt like

an irate ticket-holder at a prize-fight where the principals

refused to mix it up.

That was his total reaction.

“HA-HA HORTENSE!”

“All right, ponies!”

“Shake it up!”

“Hey, ponies—how about easing up on that crap game and shaking a

mean hip?”

“Hey, _ponies!_”

The coach fumed helplessly, the Triangle Club president,

glowering with anxiety, varied between furious bursts of

authority and fits of temperamental lassitude, when he sat

spiritless and wondered how the devil the show was ever going on

tour by Christmas.

“All right. We’ll take the pirate song.”

The ponies took last drags at their cigarettes and slumped into

place; the leading lady rushed into the foreground, setting his

hands and feet in an atmospheric mince; and as the coach clapped

and stamped and tumped and da-da’d, they hashed out a dance.

A great, seething ant-hill was the Triangle Club. It gave a

musical comedy every year, travelling with cast, chorus,

orchestra, and scenery all through Christmas vacation. The play

and music were the work of undergraduates, and the club itself

was the most influential of institutions, over three hundred men

competing for it every year.

Amory, after an easy victory in the first sophomore Princetonian

competition, stepped into a vacancy of the cast as Boiling Oil, a

Pirate Lieutenant. Every night for the last week they had

rehearsed “Ha-Ha Hortense!” in the Casino, from two in the

afternoon until eight in the morning, sustained by dark and

powerful coffee, and sleeping in lectures through the interim. A

rare scene, the Casino. A big, barnlike auditorium, dotted with

boys as girls, boys as pirates, boys as babies; the scenery in

course of being violently set up; the spotlight man rehearsing by

throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over all the constant

tuning of the orchestra or the cheerful tumpty-tump of a Triangle

tune. The boy who writes the lyrics stands in the corner, biting

a pencil, with twenty minutes to think of an encore; the business

manager argues with the secretary as to how much money can be

spent on “those damn milkmaid costumes”; the old graduate,

president in ninety-eight, perches on a box and thinks how much

simpler it was in his day.

How a Triangle show ever got off was a mystery, but it was a

riotous mystery, anyway, whether or not one did enough service to

wear a little gold Triangle on his watch-chain. “Ha-Ha Hortense!”

was written over six times and had the names of nine

collaborators on the programme. All Triangle shows started by

being “something different—not just a regular musical comedy,”

but when the several authors, the president, the coach and the

faculty committee finished with it, there remained just the old

reliable Triangle show with the old reliable jokes and the star

comedian who got expelled or sick or something just before the

trip, and the dark-whiskered man in the pony-ballet, who

“absolutely won’t shave twice a day, doggone it!”

There was one brilliant place in “Ha-Ha Hortense!” It is a

Princeton tradition that whenever a Yale man who is a member of

the widely advertised “Skull and Bones” hears the sacred name

mentioned, he must leave the room. It is also a tradition that

the members are invariably successful in later life, amassing

fortunes or votes or coupons or whatever they choose to amass.

Therefore, at each performance of “Ha-Ha Hortense!” half-a-dozen

seats were kept from sale and occupied by six of the

worst-looking vagabonds that could be hired from the streets,

further touched up by the Triangle make-up man. At the moment in

the show where Firebrand, the Pirate Chief, pointed at his black

flag and said, “I am a Yale graduate—note my Skull and Bones!”—at

this very moment the six vagabonds were instructed to rise

_conspicuously_ and leave the theatre with looks of deep

melancholy and an injured dignity. It was claimed though never

proved that on one occasion the hired Elis were swelled by one of

the real thing.

They played through vacation to the fashionable of eight cities.

Amory liked Louisville and Memphis best: these knew how to meet

strangers, furnished extraordinary punch, and flaunted an

astonishing array of feminine beauty. Chicago he approved for a

certain verve that transcended its loud accent—however, it was a

Yale town, and as the Yale Glee Club was expected in a week the

Triangle received only divided homage. In Baltimore, Princeton

was at home, and every one fell in love. There was a proper

consumption of strong waters all along the line; one man

invariably went on the stage highly stimulated, claiming that his

particular interpretation of the part required it. There were

three private cars; however, no one slept except in the third

car, which was called the “animal car,” and where were herded the

spectacled wind-jammers of the orchestra. Everything was so

hurried that there was no time to be bored, but when they arrived

in Philadelphia, with vacation nearly over, there was rest in

getting out of the heavy atmosphere of flowers and grease-paint,

and the ponies took off their corsets with abdominal pains and

sighs of relief.

When the disbanding came, Amory set out post haste for

Minneapolis, for Sally Weatherby’s cousin, Isabelle Borge, was

coming to spend the winter in Minneapolis while her parents went

abroad. He remembered Isabelle only as a little girl with whom he

had played sometimes when he first went to Minneapolis. She had

gone to Baltimore to live—but since then she had developed a

past.

Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant.

Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a

child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without

compunction he wired his mother not to expect him... sat in the

train, and thought about himself for thirty-six hours.

“PETTING”

On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with

that great current American phenomenon, the “petting party.”

None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were

Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were

accustomed to be kissed. “Servant-girls are that way,” says Mrs.

Huston-Carmelite to her popular daughter. “They are kissed first

and proposed to afterward.”

But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between

sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young

Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself

her first love, and between engagements the P. D. (she is

selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the

survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the

moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.

Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have

been impossible: eating three-o’clock, after-dance suppers in

impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half

of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement

that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down. But he

never realized how wide-spread it was until he saw the cities

between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue.

Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and

faint drums down-stairs... they strut and fret in the lobby,

taking another cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then

the swinging doors revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The

theatre comes afterward; then a table at the Midnight Frolic—of

course, mother will be along there, but she will serve only to

make things more secretive and brilliant as she sits in solitary

state at the deserted table and thinks such entertainments as

this are not half so bad as they are painted, only rather

wearying. But the P. D. is in love again... it was odd, wasn’t

it?—that though there was so much room left in the taxi the P. D.

and the boy from Williams were somehow crowded out and had to go

in a separate car. Odd! Didn’t you notice how flushed the P. D.

was when she arrived just seven minutes late? But the P. D. “gets

away with it.”

The “belle” had become the “flirt,” the “flirt” had become the

“baby vamp.” The “belle” had five or six callers every afternoon.

If the P. D., by some strange accident, has two, it is made

pretty uncomfortable for the one who hasn’t a date with her. The

“belle” was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermissions

between dances. Try to find the P. D. between dances, just _try_

to find her.

The same girl... deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the

questioning of moral codes. Amory found it rather fascinating to

feel that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite

possibly kiss before twelve.

“Why on earth are we here?” he asked the girl with the green

combs one night as they sat in some one’s limousine, outside the

Country Club in Louisville.

“I don’t know. I’m just full of the devil.”

“Let’s be frank—we’ll never see each other again. I wanted to

come out here with you because I thought you were the

best-looking girl in sight. You really don’t care whether you

ever see me again, do you?”

“No—but is this your line for every girl? What have I done to

deserve it?”

“And you didn’t feel tired dancing or want a cigarette or any of

the things you said? You just wanted to be—”

“Oh, let’s go in,” she interrupted, “if you want to _analyze_.

Let’s not _talk_ about it.”

When the hand-knit, sleeveless jerseys were stylish, Amory, in a

burst of inspiration, named them “petting shirts.” The name

travelled from coast to coast on the lips of parlor-snakes and P.

D.’s.

DESCRIPTIVE

Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and

exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome. He had rather a

young face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the

penetrating green eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He

lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often

accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather

a mental thing, and it was not in his power to turn it on and off

like a water-faucet. But people never forgot his face.

ISABELLE

She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed

to divers on spring-boards, leading ladies on opening nights, and

lumpy, husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded

through her. She should have descended to a burst of drums or a

discordant blend of themes from “Thais” and “Carmen.” She had

never been so curious about her appearance, she had never been so

satisfied with it. She had been sixteen years old for six months.

“Isabelle!” called her cousin Sally from the doorway of the

dressing-room.

“I’m ready.” She caught a slight lump of nervousness in her

throat.

“I had to send back to the house for another pair of slippers.

It’ll be just a minute.”

Isabelle started toward the dressing-room for a last peek in the

mirror, but something decided her to stand there and gaze down

the broad stairs of the Minnehaha Club. They curved

tantalizingly, and she could catch just a glimpse of two pairs of

masculine feet in the hall below. Pump-shod in uniform black,

they gave no hint of identity, but she wondered eagerly if one

pair were attached to Amory Blaine. This young man, not as yet

encountered, had nevertheless taken up a considerable part of her

day—the first day of her arrival. Coming up in the machine from

the station, Sally had volunteered, amid a rain of question,

comment, revelation, and exaggeration:

“You remember Amory Blaine, of _course_. Well, he’s simply mad to

see you again. He’s stayed over a day from college, and he’s

coming to-night. He’s heard so much about you—says he remembers

your eyes.”

This had pleased Isabelle. It put them on equal terms, although

she was quite capable of staging her own romances, with or

without advance advertising. But following her happy tremble of

anticipation, came a sinking sensation that made her ask:

“How do you mean he’s heard about me? What sort of things?”

Sally smiled. She felt rather in the capacity of a showman with

her more exotic cousin.

“He knows you’re—you’re considered beautiful and all that”—she

paused—“and I guess he knows you’ve been kissed.”

At this Isabelle’s little fist had clinched suddenly under the

fur robe. She was accustomed to be thus followed by her desperate

past, and it never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of

resentment; yet—in a strange town it was an advantageous

reputation. She was a “Speed,” was she? Well—let them find out.

Out of the window Isabelle watched the snow glide by in the

frosty morning. It was ever so much colder here than in

Baltimore; she had not remembered; the glass of the side door was

iced, the windows were shirred with snow in the corners. Her mind

played still with one subject. Did _he_ dress like that boy

there, who walked calmly down a bustling business street, in

moccasins and winter-carnival costume? How very _Western!_ Of

course he wasn’t that way: he went to Princeton, was a sophomore

or something. Really she had no distinct idea of him. An ancient

snap-shot she had preserved in an old kodak book had impressed

her by the big eyes (which he had probably grown up to by now).

However, in the last month, when her winter visit to Sally had

been decided on, he had assumed the proportions of a worthy

adversary. Children, most astute of match-makers, plot their

campaigns quickly, and Sally had played a clever correspondence

sonata to Isabelle’s excitable temperament. Isabelle had been for

some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions....

They drew up at a spreading, white-stone building, set back from

the snowy street. Mrs. Weatherby greeted her warmly and her

various younger cousins were produced from the corners where they

skulked politely. Isabelle met them tactfully. At her best she

allied all with whom she came in contact—except older girls and

some women. All the impressions she made were conscious. The

half-dozen girls she renewed acquaintance with that morning were

all rather impressed and as much by her direct personality as by

her reputation. Amory Blaine was an open subject. Evidently a bit

light of love, neither popular nor unpopular—every girl there

seemed to have had an affair with him at some time or other, but

no one volunteered any really useful information. He was going to

fall for her.... Sally had published that information to her

young set and they were retailing it back to Sally as fast as

they set eyes on Isabelle. Isabelle resolved secretly that she

would, if necessary, _force_ herself to like him—she owed it to

Sally. Suppose she were terribly disappointed. Sally had painted

him in such glowing colors—he was good-looking, “sort of

distinguished, when he wants to be,” had a line, and was properly

inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age

and environment led her to desire. She wondered if those were his

dancing-shoes that fox-trotted tentatively around the soft rug

below.

All impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely

kaleidoscopic to Isabelle. She had that curious mixture of the

social and the artistic temperaments found often in two classes,

society women and actresses. Her education or, rather, her

sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled

on her favor; her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for

love-affairs was limited only by the number of the susceptible

within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large

black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical

magnetism.

So she waited at the head of the stairs that evening while

slippers were fetched. Just as she was growing impatient, Sally

came out of the dressing-room, beaming with her accustomed good

nature and high spirits, and together they descended to the floor

below, while the shifting search-light of Isabelle’s mind flashed

on two ideas: she was glad she had high color to-night, and she

wondered if he danced well.

Down-stairs, in the club’s great room, she was surrounded for a

moment by the girls she had met in the afternoon, then she heard

Sally’s voice repeating a cycle of names, and found herself

bowing to a sextet of black and white, terribly stiff, vaguely

familiar figures. The name Blaine figured somewhere, but at first

she could not place him. A very confused, very juvenile moment of

awkward backings and bumpings followed, and every one found

himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabelle

manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with

whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A

humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things

Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable. First,

she repeated it rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto with a

soupcon of Southern accent; then she held it off at a distance

and smiled at it—her wonderful smile; then she delivered it in

variations and played a sort of mental catch with it, all this in

the nominal form of dialogue. Froggy was fascinated and quite

unconscious that this was being done, not for him, but for the

green eyes that glistened under the shining carefully watered

hair, a little to her left, for Isabelle had discovered Amory. As

an actress even in the fullest flush of her own conscious

magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the

front row, so Isabelle sized up her antagonist. First, he had

auburn hair, and from her feeling of disappointment she knew that

she had expected him to be dark and of garter-advertisement

slenderness.... For the rest, a faint flush and a straight,

romantic profile; the effect set off by a close-fitting dress

suit and a silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women still

delight to see men wear, but men were just beginning to get tired

of.

During this inspection Amory was quietly watching.

“Don’t _you_ think so?” she said suddenly, turning to him,

innocent-eyed.

There was a stir, and Sally led the way over to their table.

Amory struggled to Isabelle’s side, and whispered:

“You’re my dinner partner, you know. We’re all coached for each

other.”

Isabelle gasped—this was rather right in line. But really she

felt as if a good speech had been taken from the star and given

to a minor character.... She mustn’t lose the leadership a bit.

The dinner-table glittered with laughter at the confusion of

getting places and then curious eyes were turned on her, sitting

near the head. She was enjoying this immensely, and Froggy Parker

was so engrossed with the added sparkle of her rising color that

he forgot to pull out Sally’s chair, and fell into a dim

confusion. Amory was on the other side, full of confidence and

vanity, gazing at her in open admiration. He began directly, and

so did Froggy:

“I’ve heard a lot about you since you wore braids—”

“Wasn’t it funny this afternoon—”

Both stopped. Isabelle turned to Amory shyly. Her face was always

enough answer for any one, but she decided to speak.

“How—from whom?”

“From everybody—for all the years since you’ve been away.” She

blushed appropriately. On her right Froggy was _hors de combat_

already, although he hadn’t quite realized it.

“I’ll tell you what I remembered about you all these years,”

Amory continued. She leaned slightly toward him and looked

modestly at the celery before her. Froggy sighed—he knew Amory,

and the situations that Amory seemed born to handle. He turned to

Sally and asked her if she was going away to school next year.

Amory opened with grape-shot.

“I’ve got an adjective that just fits you.” This was one of his

favorite starts—he seldom had a word in mind, but it was a

curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something

complimentary if he got in a tight corner.

“Oh—what?” Isabelle’s face was a study in enraptured curiosity.

Amory shook his head.

“I don’t know you very well yet.”

“Will you tell me—afterward?” she half whispered.

He nodded.

“We’ll sit out.”

Isabelle nodded.

“Did any one ever tell you, you have keen eyes?” she said.

Amory attempted to make them look even keener. He fancied, but he

was not sure, that her foot had just touched his under the table.

But it might possibly have been only the table leg. It was so

hard to tell. Still it thrilled him. He wondered quickly if there

would be any difficulty in securing the little den up-stairs.

BABES IN THE WOODS

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they

particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little

value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably

be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he

had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest

was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room

conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had

walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her

eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was

proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop

off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear

it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of

blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had

slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose—it was

one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He

was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because

she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best

game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity

before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite

guile that would have horrified her parents.

After the dinner the dance began... smoothly. Smoothly?—boys cut

in on Isabelle every few feet and then squabbled in the corners

with: “You might let me get more than an inch!” and “She didn’t

like it either—she told me so next time I cut in.” It was

true—she told every one so, and gave every hand a parting

pressure that said: “You know that your dances are _making_ my

evening.”

But time passed, two hours of it, and the less subtle beaux had

better learned to focus their pseudo-passionate glances

elsewhere, for eleven o’clock found Isabelle and Amory sitting on

the couch in the little den off the reading-room up-stairs. She

was conscious that they were a handsome pair, and seemed to

belong distinctively in this seclusion, while lesser lights

fluttered and chattered down-stairs.

Boys who passed the door looked in enviously—girls who passed

only laughed and frowned and grew wise within themselves.

They had now reached a very definite stage. They had traded

accounts of their progress since they had met last, and she had

listened to much she had heard before. He was a sophomore, was on

the Princetonian board, hoped to be chairman in senior year. He

learned that some of the boys she went with in Baltimore were

“terrible speeds” and came to dances in states of artificial

stimulation; most of them were twenty or so, and drove alluring

red Stutzes. A good half seemed to have already flunked out of

various schools and colleges, but some of them bore athletic

names that made him look at her admiringly. As a matter of fact,

Isabelle’s closer acquaintance with the universities was just

commencing. She had bowing acquaintance with a lot of young men

who thought she was a “pretty kid—worth keeping an eye on.” But

Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gayety that would

have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young

contralto voices on sink-down sofas.

He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was

a difference between conceit and self-confidence. She adored

self-confidence in men.

“Is Froggy a good friend of yours?” she asked.

“Rather—why?”

“He’s a bum dancer.”

Amory laughed.

“He dances as if the girl were on his back instead of in his

arms.”

She appreciated this.

“You’re awfully good at sizing people up.”

Amory denied this painfully. However, he sized up several people

for her. Then they talked about hands.

“You’ve got awfully nice hands,” she said. “They look as if you

played the piano. Do you?”

I have said they had reached a very definite stage—nay, more, a

very critical stage. Amory had stayed over a day to see her, and

his train left at twelve-eighteen that night. His trunk and

suitcase awaited him at the station; his watch was beginning to

hang heavy in his pocket.

“Isabelle,” he said suddenly, “I want to tell you something.”

They had been talking lightly about “that funny look in her

eyes,” and Isabelle knew from the change in his manner what was

coming—indeed, she had been wondering how soon it would come.

Amory reached above their heads and turned out the electric

light, so that they were in the dark, except for the red glow

that fell through the door from the reading-room lamps. Then he

began:

“I don’t know whether or not you know what you—what I’m going to

say. Lordy, Isabelle—this _sounds_ like a line, but it isn’t.”

“I know,” said Isabelle softly.

“Maybe we’ll never meet again like this—I have darned hard luck

sometimes.” He was leaning away from her on the other arm of the

lounge, but she could see his eyes plainly in the dark.

“You’ll meet me again—silly.” There was just the slightest

emphasis on the last word—so that it became almost a term of

endearment. He continued a bit huskily:

“I’ve fallen for a lot of people—girls—and I guess you have,

too—boys, I mean, but, honestly, you—” he broke off suddenly and

leaned forward, chin on his hands: “Oh, what’s the use—you’ll go

your way and I suppose I’ll go mine.”

Silence for a moment. Isabelle was quite stirred; she wound her

handkerchief into a tight ball, and by the faint light that

streamed over her, dropped it deliberately on the floor. Their

hands touched for an instant, but neither spoke. Silences were

becoming more frequent and more delicious. Outside another stray

couple had come up and were experimenting on the piano in the

next room. After the usual preliminary of “chopsticks,” one of

them started “Babes in the Woods” and a light tenor carried the

words into the den:

“Give me your hand I’ll understand We’re off to slumberland.”

Isabelle hummed it softly and trembled as she felt Amory’s hand

close over hers.

“Isabelle,” he whispered. “You know I’m mad about you. You _do_

give a darn about me.”

“Yes.”

“How much do you care—do you like any one better?”

“No.” He could scarcely hear her, although he bent so near that

he felt her breath against his cheek.

“Isabelle, I’m going back to college for six long months, and why

shouldn’t we—if I could only just have one thing to remember you

by—”

“Close the door....” Her voice had just stirred so that he half

wondered whether she had spoken at all. As he swung the door

softly shut, the music seemed quivering just outside.

“Moonlight is bright, Kiss me good night.”

What a wonderful song, she thought—everything was wonderful

to-night, most of all this romantic scene in the den, with their

hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The

future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes

like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs

of warm limousines and in low, cosy roadsters stopped under

sheltering trees—only the boy might change, and this one was so

nice. He took her hand softly. With a sudden movement he turned

it and, holding it to his lips, kissed the palm.

“Isabelle!” His whisper blended in the music, and they seemed to

float nearer together. Her breath came faster. “Can’t I kiss you,

Isabelle—Isabelle?” Lips half parted, she turned her head to him

in the dark. Suddenly the ring of voices, the sound of running

footsteps surged toward them. Quick as a flash Amory reached up

and turned on the light, and when the door opened and three boys,

the wrathy and dance-craving Froggy among them, rushed in, he was

turning over the magazines on the table, while she sat without

moving, serene and unembarrassed, and even greeted them with a

welcoming smile. But her heart was beating wildly, and she felt

somehow as if she had been deprived.

It was evidently over. There was a clamor for a dance, there was

a glance that passed between them—on his side despair, on hers

regret, and then the evening went on, with the reassured beaux

and the eternal cutting in.

At quarter to twelve Amory shook hands with her gravely, in the

midst of a small crowd assembled to wish him good-speed. For an

instant he lost his poise, and she felt a bit rattled when a

satirical voice from a concealed wit cried:

“Take her outside, Amory!” As he took her hand he pressed it a

little, and she returned the pressure as she had done to twenty

hands that evening—that was all.

At two o’clock back at the Weatherbys’ Sally asked her if she and

Amory had had a “time” in the den. Isabelle turned to her

quietly. In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate

dreamer of Joan-like dreams.

“No,” she answered. “I don’t do that sort of thing any more; he

asked me to, but I said no.”

As she crept in bed she wondered what he’d say in his special

delivery to-morrow. He had such a good-looking mouth—would she

ever—?

“Fourteen angels were watching o’er them,” sang Sally sleepily

from the next room.

“Damn!” muttered Isabelle, punching the pillow into a luxurious

lump and exploring the cold sheets cautiously. “Damn!”

CARNIVAL

Amory, by way of the Princetonian, had arrived. The minor snobs,

finely balanced thermometers of success, warmed to him as the

club elections grew nigh, and he and Tom were visited by groups

of upper classmen who arrived awkwardly, balanced on the edge of

the furniture and talked of all subjects except the one of

absorbing interest. Amory was amused at the intent eyes upon him,

and, in case the visitors represented some club in which he was

not interested, took great pleasure in shocking them with

unorthodox remarks.

“Oh, let me see—” he said one night to a flabbergasted

delegation, “what club do you represent?”

With visitors from Ivy and Cottage and Tiger Inn he played the

“nice, unspoilt, ingenuous boy” very much at ease and quite

unaware of the object of the call.

When the fatal morning arrived, early in March, and the campus

became a document in hysteria, he slid smoothly into Cottage with

Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with much

wonder.

There were fickle groups that jumped from club to club; there

were friends of two or three days who announced tearfully and

wildly that they must join the same club, nothing should separate

them; there were snarling disclosures of long-hidden grudges as

the Suddenly Prominent remembered snubs of freshman year. Unknown

men were elevated into importance when they received certain

coveted bids; others who were considered “all set” found that

they had made unexpected enemies, felt themselves stranded and

deserted, talked wildly of leaving college.

In his own crowd Amory saw men kept out for wearing green hats,

for being “a damn tailor’s dummy,” for having “too much pull in

heaven,” for getting drunk one night “not like a gentleman, by

God,” or for unfathomable secret reasons known to no one but the

wielders of the black balls.

This orgy of sociability culminated in a gigantic party at the

Nassau Inn, where punch was dispensed from immense bowls, and the

whole down-stairs became a delirious, circulating, shouting

pattern of faces and voices.

“Hi, Dibby—’gratulations!”

“Goo’ boy, Tom, you got a good bunch in Cap.”

“Say, Kerry—”

“Oh, Kerry—I hear you went Tiger with all the weight-lifters!”

“Well, I didn’t go Cottage—the parlor-snakes’ delight.”

“They say Overton fainted when he got his Ivy bid—Did he sign up

the first day?—oh, _no_. Tore over to Murray-Dodge on a

bicycle—afraid it was a mistake.”

“How’d you get into Cap—you old roue?”

“’Gratulations!”

“’Gratulations yourself. Hear you got a good crowd.”

When the bar closed, the party broke up into groups and streamed,

singing, over the snow-clad campus, in a weird delusion that

snobbishness and strain were over at last, and that they could do

what they pleased for the next two years.

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest

time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found

it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen

new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

Alec Connage came into his room one morning and woke him up into

the sunshine and peculiar glory of Campbell Hall shining in the

window.

“Wake up, Original Sin, and scrape yourself together. Be in front

of Renwick’s in half an hour. Somebody’s got a car.” He took the

bureau cover and carefully deposited it, with its load of small

articles, upon the bed.

“Where’d you get the car?” demanded Amory cynically.

“Sacred trust, but don’t be a critical goopher or you can’t go!”

“I think I’ll sleep,” Amory said calmly, resettling himself and

reaching beside the bed for a cigarette.

“Sleep!”

“Why not? I’ve got a class at eleven-thirty.”

“You damned gloom! Of course, if you don’t want to go to the

coast—”

With a bound Amory was out of bed, scattering the bureau cover’s

burden on the floor. The coast... he hadn’t seen it for years,

since he and his mother were on their pilgrimage.

“Who’s going?” he demanded as he wriggled into his B. V. D.’s.

“Oh, Dick Humbird and Kerry Holiday and Jesse Ferrenby and—oh

about five or six. Speed it up, kid!”

In ten minutes Amory was devouring cornflakes in Renwick’s, and

at nine-thirty they bowled happily out of town, headed for the

sands of Deal Beach.

“You see,” said Kerry, “the car belongs down there. In fact, it

was stolen from Asbury Park by persons unknown, who deserted it

in Princeton and left for the West. Heartless Humbird here got

permission from the city council to deliver it.”

“Anybody got any money?” suggested Ferrenby, turning around from

the front seat.

There was an emphatic negative chorus.

“That makes it interesting.”

“Money—what’s money? We can sell the car.”

“Charge him salvage or something.”

“How’re we going to get food?” asked Amory.

“Honestly,” answered Kerry, eying him reprovingly, “do you doubt

Kerry’s ability for three short days? Some people have lived on

nothing for years at a time. Read the Boy Scout Monthly.”

“Three days,” Amory mused, “and I’ve got classes.”

“One of the days is the Sabbath.”

“Just the same, I can only cut six more classes, with over a

month and a half to go.”

“Throw him out!”

“It’s a long walk back.”

“Amory, you’re running it out, if I may coin a new phrase.”

“Hadn’t you better get some dope on yourself, Amory?”

Amory subsided resignedly and drooped into a contemplation of the

scenery. Swinburne seemed to fit in somehow.

“Oh, winter’s rains and ruins are over, And all the seasons of snows

and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses,

the night that wins; And time remembered is grief forgotten, And

frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and

cover, Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

“The full streams feed on flower of—”

“What’s the matter, Amory? Amory’s thinking about poetry, about

the pretty birds and flowers. I can see it in his eye.”

“No, I’m not,” he lied. “I’m thinking about the Princetonian. I

ought to make up to-night; but I can telephone back, I suppose.”

“Oh,” said Kerry respectfully, “these important men—”

Amory flushed and it seemed to him that Ferrenby, a defeated

competitor, winced a little. Of course, Kerry was only kidding,

but he really mustn’t mention the Princetonian.

It was a halcyon day, and as they neared the shore and the salt

breezes scurried by, he began to picture the ocean and long,

level stretches of sand and red roofs over blue sea. Then they

hurried through the little town and it all flashed upon his

consciousness to a mighty paean of emotion....

“Oh, good Lord! _Look_ at it!” he cried.

“What?”

“Let me out, quick—I haven’t seen it for eight years! Oh,

gentlefolk, stop the car!”

“What an odd child!” remarked Alec.

“I do believe he’s a bit eccentric.”

The car was obligingly drawn up at a curb, and Amory ran for the

boardwalk. First, he realized that the sea was blue and that

there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and

roared—really all the banalities about the ocean that one could

realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were

banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.

“Now we’ll get lunch,” ordered Kerry, wandering up with the

crowd. “Come on, Amory, tear yourself away and get practical.”

“We’ll try the best hotel first,” he went on, “and thence and so

forth.”

They strolled along the boardwalk to the most imposing hostelry

in sight, and, entering the dining-room, scattered about a table.

“Eight Bronxes,” commanded Alec, “and a club sandwich and

Juliennes. The food for one. Hand the rest around.”

Amory ate little, having seized a chair where he could watch the

sea and feel the rock of it. When luncheon was over they sat and

smoked quietly.

“What’s the bill?”

Some one scanned it.

“Eight twenty-five.”

“Rotten overcharge. We’ll give them two dollars and one for the

waiter. Kerry, collect the small change.”

The waiter approached, and Kerry gravely handed him a dollar,

tossed two dollars on the check, and turned away. They sauntered

leisurely toward the door, pursued in a moment by the suspicious

Ganymede.

“Some mistake, sir.”

Kerry took the bill and examined it critically.

“No mistake!” he said, shaking his head gravely, and, tearing it

into four pieces, he handed the scraps to the waiter, who was so

dumfounded that he stood motionless and expressionless while they

walked out.

“Won’t he send after us?”

“No,” said Kerry; “for a minute he’ll think we’re the

proprietor’s sons or something; then he’ll look at the check

again and call the manager, and in the meantime—”

They left the car at Asbury and street-car’d to Allenhurst, where

they investigated the crowded pavilions for beauty. At four there

were refreshments in a lunch-room, and this time they paid an

even smaller per cent on the total cost; something about the

appearance and savoir-faire of the crowd made the thing go, and

they were not pursued.

“You see, Amory, we’re Marxian Socialists,” explained Kerry. “We

don’t believe in property and we’re putting it to the great

test.”

“Night will descend,” Amory suggested.

“Watch, and put your trust in Holiday.”

They became jovial about five-thirty and, linking arms, strolled

up and down the boardwalk in a row, chanting a monotonous ditty

about the sad sea waves. Then Kerry saw a face in the crowd that

attracted him and, rushing off, reappeared in a moment with one

of the homeliest girls Amory had ever set eyes on. Her pale mouth

extended from ear to ear, her teeth projected in a solid wedge,

and she had little, squinty eyes that peeped ingratiatingly over

the side sweep of her nose. Kerry presented them formally.

“Name of Kaluka, Hawaiian queen! Let me present Messrs. Connage,

Sloane, Humbird, Ferrenby, and Blaine.”

The girl bobbed courtesies all around. Poor creature; Amory

supposed she had never before been noticed in her life—possibly

she was half-witted. While she accompanied them (Kerry had

invited her to supper) she said nothing which could

discountenance such a belief.

“She prefers her native dishes,” said Alec gravely to the waiter,

“but any coarse food will do.”

All through supper he addressed her in the most respectful

language, while Kerry made idiotic love to her on the other side,

and she giggled and grinned. Amory was content to sit and watch

the by-play, thinking what a light touch Kerry had, and how he

could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and

contour. They all seemed to have the spirit of it more or less,

and it was a relaxation to be with them. Amory usually liked men

individually, yet feared them in crowds unless the crowd was

around him. He wondered how much each one contributed to the

party, for there was somewhat of a spiritual tax levied. Alec and

Kerry were the life of it, but not quite the centre. Somehow the

quiet Humbird, and Sloane, with his impatient superciliousness,

were the centre.

Dick Humbird had, ever since freshman year, seemed to Amory a

perfect type of aristocrat. He was slender but well-built—black

curly hair, straight features, and rather a dark skin. Everything

he said sounded intangibly appropriate. He possessed infinite

courage, an averagely good mind, and a sense of honor with a

clear charm and _noblesse oblige_ that varied it from

righteousness. He could dissipate without going to pieces, and

even his most bohemian adventures never seemed “running it out.”

People dressed like him, tried to talk as he did.... Amory

decided that he probably held the world back, but he wouldn’t

have changed him. ...

He differed from the healthy type that was essentially middle

class—he never seemed to perspire. Some people couldn’t be

familiar with a chauffeur without having it returned; Humbird

could have lunched at Sherry’s with a colored man, yet people

would have somehow known that it was all right. He was not a

snob, though he knew only half his class. His friends ranged from

the highest to the lowest, but it was impossible to “cultivate”

him. Servants worshipped him, and treated him like a god. He

seemed the eternal example of what the upper class tries to be.

“He’s like those pictures in the Illustrated London News of the

English officers who have been killed,” Amory had said to Alec.

“Well,” Alec had answered, “if you want to know the shocking

truth, his father was a grocery clerk who made a fortune in

Tacoma real estate and came to New York ten years ago.”

Amory had felt a curious sinking sensation.

This present type of party was made possible by the surging

together of the class after club elections—as if to make a last

desperate attempt to know itself, to keep together, to fight off

the tightening spirit of the clubs. It was a let-down from the

conventional heights they had all walked so rigidly.

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled

back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new

sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it

seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad; Amory

thought of Kipling’s

“Beaches of Lukanon before the sealers came.”

It was still a music, though, infinitely sorrowful.

Ten o’clock found them penniless. They had suppered greatly on

their last eleven cents and, singing, strolled up through the

casinos and lighted arches on the boardwalk, stopping to listen

approvingly to all band concerts. In one place Kerry took up a

collection for the French War Orphans which netted a dollar and

twenty cents, and with this they bought some brandy in case they

caught cold in the night. They finished the day in a

moving-picture show and went into solemn systematic roars of

laughter at an ancient comedy, to the startled annoyance of the

rest of the audience. Their entrance was distinctly strategic,

for each man as he entered pointed reproachfully at the one just

behind him. Sloane, bringing up the rear, disclaimed all

knowledge and responsibility as soon as the others were scattered

inside; then as the irate ticket-taker rushed in he followed

nonchalantly.

They reassembled later by the Casino and made arrangements for

the night. Kerry wormed permission from the watchman to sleep on

the platform and, having collected a huge pile of rugs from the

booths to serve as mattresses and blankets, they talked until

midnight, and then fell into a dreamless sleep, though Amory

tried hard to stay awake and watch that marvellous moon settle on

the sea.

So they progressed for two happy days, up and down the shore by

street-car or machine, or by shoe-leather on the crowded

boardwalk; sometimes eating with the wealthy, more frequently

dining frugally at the expense of an unsuspecting restaurateur.

They had their photos taken, eight poses, in a quick-development

store. Kerry insisted on grouping them as a “varsity” football

team, and then as a tough gang from the East Side, with their

coats inside out, and himself sitting in the middle on a

cardboard moon. The photographer probably has them yet—at least,

they never called for them. The weather was perfect, and again

they slept outside, and again Amory fell unwillingly asleep.

Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea seemed to

mumble and complain, so they returned to Princeton via the Fords

of transient farmers, and broke up with colds in their heads, but

otherwise none the worse for wandering.

Even more than in the year before, Amory neglected his work, not

deliberately but lazily and through a multitude of other

interests. Co-ordinate geometry and the melancholy hexameters of

Corneille and Racine held forth small allurements, and even

psychology, which he had eagerly awaited, proved to be a dull

subject full of muscular reactions and biological phrases rather

than the study of personality and influence. That was a noon

class, and it always sent him dozing. Having found that

“subjective and objective, sir,” answered most of the questions,

he used the phrase on all occasions, and it became the class joke

when, on a query being levelled at him, he was nudged awake by

Ferrenby or Sloane to gasp it out.

Mostly there were parties—to Orange or the Shore, more rarely to

New York and Philadelphia, though one night they marshalled

fourteen waitresses out of Childs’ and took them to ride down

Fifth Avenue on top of an auto bus. They all cut more classes

than were allowed, which meant an additional course the following

year, but spring was too rare to let anything interfere with

their colorful ramblings. In May Amory was elected to the

Sophomore Prom Committee, and when after a long evening’s

discussion with Alec they made out a tentative list of class

probabilities for the senior council, they placed themselves

among the surest. The senior council was composed presumably of

the eighteen most representative seniors, and in view of Alec’s

football managership and Amory’s chance of nosing out Burne

Holiday as Princetonian chairman, they seemed fairly justified in

this presumption. Oddly enough, they both placed D’Invilliers as

among the possibilities, a guess that a year before the class

would have gaped at.

All through the spring Amory had kept up an intermittent

correspondence with Isabelle Borge, punctuated by violent

squabbles and chiefly enlivened by his attempts to find new words

for love. He discovered Isabelle to be discreetly and

aggravatingly unsentimental in letters, but he hoped against hope

that she would prove not too exotic a bloom to fit the large

spaces of spring as she had fitted the den in the Minnehaha Club.

During May he wrote thirty-page documents almost nightly, and

sent them to her in bulky envelopes exteriorly labelled “Part I”

and “Part II.”

“Oh, Alec, I believe I’m tired of college,” he said sadly, as

they walked the dusk together.

“I think I am, too, in a way.”

“All I’d like would be a little home in the country, some warm

country, and a wife, and just enough to do to keep from rotting.”

“Me, too.”

“I’d like to quit.”

“What does your girl say?”

“Oh!” Amory gasped in horror. “She wouldn’t _think_ of

marrying... that is, not now. I mean the future, you know.”

“My girl would. I’m engaged.”

“Are you really?”

“Yes. Don’t say a word to anybody, please, but I am. I may not

come back next year.”

“But you’re only twenty! Give up college?”

“Why, Amory, you were saying a minute ago—”

“Yes,” Amory interrupted, “but I was just wishing. I wouldn’t

think of leaving college. It’s just that I feel so sad these

wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and

I’m not really getting all I could out of them. I wish my girl

lived here. But marry—not a chance. Especially as father says the

money isn’t forthcoming as it used to be.”

“What a waste these nights are!” agreed Alec.

But Amory sighed and made use of the nights. He had a snap-shot

of Isabelle, enshrined in an old watch, and at eight almost every

night he would turn off all the lights except the desk lamp and,

sitting by the open windows with the picture before him, write

her rapturous letters.

... Oh it’s so hard to write you what I really _feel_ when I think

about you so much; you’ve gotten to mean to me a _dream_ that I can’t

put on paper any more. Your last letter came and it was wonderful! I

read it over about six times, especially the last part, but I do wish,

sometimes, you’d be more _frank_ and tell me what you really do think

of me, yet your last letter was too good to be true, and I can hardly

wait until June! Be sure and be able to come to the prom. It’ll be

fine, I think, and I want to bring _you_ just at the end of a

wonderful year. I often think over what you said on that night and

wonder how much you meant. If it were anyone but you—but you see I

_thought_ you were fickle the first time I saw you and you are so

popular and everthing that I can’t imagine you really liking me

_best_.

Oh, Isabelle, dear—it’s a wonderful night. Somebody is playing “Love

Moon” on a mandolin far across the campus, and the music seems to

bring you into the window. Now he’s playing “Good-by, Boys, I’m

Through,” and how well it suits me. For I am through with

everything. I have decided never to take a cocktail again, and I

know I’ll never again fall in love—I couldn’t—you’ve been too much a

part of my days and nights to ever let me think of another girl. I

meet them all the time and they don’t interest me. I’m not pretending

to be blasé, because it’s not that. It’s just that I’m in love. Oh,

_dearest_ Isabelle (somehow I can’t call you just Isabelle, and I’m

afraid I’ll come out with the “dearest” before your family this

June), you’ve got to come to the prom, and then I’ll come up to your

house for a day and everything’ll be perfect....

And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them

infinitely charming, infinitely new.

June came and the days grew so hot and lazy that they could not

worry even about exams, but spent dreamy evenings on the court of

Cottage, talking of long subjects until the sweep of country

toward Stony Brook became a blue haze and the lilacs were white

around tennis-courts, and words gave way to silent cigarettes....

Then down deserted Prospect and along McCosh with song everywhere

around them, up to the hot joviality of Nassau Street.

Tom D’Invilliers and Amory walked late in those days. A gambling

fever swept through the sophomore class and they bent over the

bones till three o’clock many a sultry night. After one session

they came out of Sloane’s room to find the dew fallen and the

stars old in the sky.

“Let’s borrow bicycles and take a ride,” Amory suggested.

“All right. I’m not a bit tired and this is almost the last night

of the year, really, because the prom stuff starts Monday.”

They found two unlocked bicycles in Holder Court and rode out

about half-past three along the Lawrenceville Road.

“What are you going to do this summer, Amory?”

“Don’t ask me—same old things, I suppose. A month or two in Lake

Geneva—I’m counting on you to be there in July, you know—then

there’ll be Minneapolis, and that means hundreds of summer hops,

parlor-snaking, getting bored—But oh, Tom,” he added suddenly,

“hasn’t this year been slick!”

“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks,

shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never

want to play another. You’re all right—you’re a rubber ball, and

somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the

local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go

where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties

and the roll of their coats.”

“You can’t, Tom,” argued Amory, as they rolled along through the

scattering night; “wherever you go now you’ll always

unconsciously apply these standards of ‘having it’ or ‘lacking

it.’ For better or worse we’ve stamped you; you’re a Princeton

type!”

“Well, then,” complained Tom, his cracked voice rising

plaintively, “why do I have to come back at all? I’ve learned all

that Princeton has to offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and

lying around a club aren’t going to help. They’re just going to

disorganize me, conventionalize me completely. Even now I’m so

spineless that I wonder how I get away with it.”

“Oh, but you’re missing the real point, Tom,” Amory interrupted.

“You’ve just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the

world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the

thoughtful man a social sense.”

“You consider you taught me that, don’t you?” he asked

quizzically, eying Amory in the half dark.

Amory laughed quietly.

“Didn’t I?”

“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think you’re my bad angel. I

might have been a pretty fair poet.”

“Come on, that’s rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern

college. Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling

quality of people, or you’d have gone through blind, and you’d

hate to have done that—been like Marty Kaye.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you’re right. I wouldn’t have liked it. Still,

it’s hard to be made a cynic at twenty.”

“I was born one,” Amory murmured. “I’m a cynical idealist.” He

paused and wondered if that meant anything.

They reached the sleeping school of Lawrenceville, and turned to

ride back.

“It’s good, this ride, isn’t it?” Tom said presently.

“Yes; it’s a good finish, it’s knock-out; everything’s good

to-night. Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!”

“Oh, you and your Isabelle! I’ll bet she’s a simple one... let’s

say some poetry.”

So Amory declaimed “The Ode to a Nightingale” to the bushes they

passed.

“I’ll never be a poet,” said Amory as he finished. “I’m not

enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious

things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring

evenings, music at night, the sea; I don’t catch the subtle

things like ‘silver-snarling trumpets.’ I may turn out an

intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”

They rode into Princeton as the sun was making colored maps of

the sky behind the graduate school, and hurried to the

refreshment of a shower that would have to serve in place of

sleep. By noon the bright-costumed alumni crowded the streets

with their bands and choruses, and in the tents there was great

reunion under the orange-and-black banners that curled and

strained in the wind. Amory looked long at one house which bore

the legend “Sixty-nine.” There a few gray-haired men sat and

talked quietly while the classes swept by in panorama of life.

UNDER THE ARC-LIGHT

Then tragedy’s emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the

edge of June. On the night after his ride to Lawrenceville a

crowd sallied to New York in quest of adventure, and started back

to Princeton about twelve o’clock in two machines. It had been a

gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented.

Amory was in the car behind; they had taken the wrong road and

lost the way, and so were hurrying to catch up.

It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to

Amory’s head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming

in his mind. ...

So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life

stirred as it went by.... As the still ocean paths before the shark

in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed

trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across

the air....

A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a yellow

moon—then silence, where crescendo laughter fades... the car swung

out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows where the

distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into blue....

They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was

standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward

he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and

the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke:

“You Princeton boys?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s one of you killed here, and two others about

dead.”

“_My God!_”

“Look!” She pointed and they gazed in horror. Under the full

light of a roadside arc-light lay a form, face downward in a

widening circle of blood.

They sprang from the car. Amory thought of the back of that

head—that hair—that hair... and then they turned the form over.

“It’s Dick—Dick Humbird!”

“Oh, Christ!”

“Feel his heart!”

Then the insistent voice of the old crone in a sort of croaking

triumph:

“He’s quite dead, all right. The car turned over. Two of the men

that weren’t hurt just carried the others in, but this one’s no

use.”

Amory rushed into the house and the rest followed with a limp

mass that they laid on the sofa in the shoddy little front

parlor. Sloane, with his shoulder punctured, was on another

lounge. He was half delirious, and kept calling something about a

chemistry lecture at 8:10.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Ferrenby in a strained voice.

“Dick was driving and he wouldn’t give up the wheel; we told him

he’d been drinking too much—then there was this damn curve—oh, my

_God!_...” He threw himself face downward on the floor and broke

into dry sobs.

The doctor had arrived, and Amory went over to the couch, where

some one handed him a sheet to put over the body. With a sudden

hardness, he raised one of the hands and let it fall back

inertly. The brow was cold but the face not expressionless. He

looked at the shoe-laces—Dick had tied them that morning. _He_

had tied them—and now he was this heavy white mass. All that

remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had

known—oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to

the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and

squalid—so useless, futile... the way animals die.... Amory was

reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of

his childhood.

“Some one go to Princeton with Ferrenby.”

Amory stepped outside the door and shivered slightly at the late

night wind—a wind that stirred a broken fender on the mass of

bent metal to a plaintive, tinny sound.

CRESCENDO!

Next day, by a merciful chance, passed in a whirl. When Amory was

by himself his thoughts zigzagged inevitably to the picture of

that red mouth yawning incongruously in the white face, but with

a determined effort he piled present excitement upon the memory

of it and shut it coldly away from his mind.

Isabelle and her mother drove into town at four, and they rode up

smiling Prospect Avenue, through the gay crowd, to have tea at

Cottage. The clubs had their annual dinners that night, so at

seven he loaned her to a freshman and arranged to meet her in the

gymnasium at eleven, when the upper classmen were admitted to the

freshman dance. She was all he had expected, and he was happy and

eager to make that night the centre of every dream. At nine the

upper classes stood in front of the clubs as the freshman

torchlight parade rioted past, and Amory wondered if the

dress-suited groups against the dark, stately backgrounds and

under the flare of the torches made the night as brilliant to the

staring, cheering freshmen as it had been to him the year before.

The next day was another whirl. They lunched in a gay party of

six in a private dining-room at the club, while Isabelle and

Amory looked at each other tenderly over the fried chicken and

knew that their love was to be eternal. They danced away the prom

until five, and the stags cut in on Isabelle with joyous abandon,

which grew more and more enthusiastic as the hour grew late, and

their wines, stored in overcoat pockets in the coat room, made

old weariness wait until another day. The stag line is a most

homogeneous mass of men. It fairly sways with a single soul. A

dark-haired beauty dances by and there is a half-gasping sound as

the ripple surges forward and some one sleeker than the rest

darts out and cuts in. Then when the six-foot girl (brought by

Kaye in your class, and to whom he has been trying to introduce

you all evening) gallops by, the line surges back and the groups

face about and become intent on far corners of the hall, for

Kaye, anxious and perspiring, appears elbowing through the crowd

in search of familiar faces.

“I say, old man, I’ve got an awfully nice—”

“Sorry, Kaye, but I’m set for this one. I’ve got to cut in on a

fella.”

“Well, the next one?”

“What—ah—er—I swear I’ve got to go cut in—look me up when she’s

got a dance free.”

It delighted Amory when Isabelle suggested that they leave for a

while and drive around in her car. For a delicious hour that

passed too soon they glided the silent roads about Princeton and

talked from the surface of their hearts in shy excitement. Amory

felt strangely ingenuous and made no attempt to kiss her.

Next day they rode up through the Jersey country, had luncheon in

New York, and in the afternoon went to see a problem play at

which Isabelle wept all through the second act, rather to Amory’s

embarrassment—though it filled him with tenderness to watch her.

He was tempted to lean over and kiss away her tears, and she

slipped her hand into his under cover of darkness to be pressed

softly.

Then at six they arrived at the Borges’ summer place on Long

Island, and Amory rushed up-stairs to change into a dinner coat.

As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as

he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed

by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best

in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was

returned. Turning on all the lights, he looked at himself in the

mirror, trying to find in his own face the qualities that made

him see clearer than the great crowd of people, that made him

decide firmly, and able to influence and follow his own will.

There was little in his life now that he would have changed. ...

Oxford might have been a bigger field.

Silently he admired himself. How conveniently well he looked, and

how well a dinner coat became him. He stepped into the hall and

then waited at the top of the stairs, for he heard footsteps

coming. It was Isabelle, and from the top of her shining hair to

her little golden slippers she had never seemed so beautiful.

“Isabelle!” he cried, half involuntarily, and held out his arms.

As in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that

half-minute, as their lips first touched, rested the high point

of vanity, the crest of his young egotism.

CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers

“Ouch! Let me go!”

He dropped his arms to his sides.

“What’s the matter?”

“Your shirt stud—it hurt me—look!” She was looking down at her

neck, where a little blue spot about the size of a pea marred its

pallor.

“Oh, Isabelle,” he reproached himself, “I’m a goopher. Really,

I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have held you so close.”

She looked up impatiently.

“Oh, Amory, of course you couldn’t help it, and it didn’t hurt

much; but what _are_ we going to do about it?”

“_Do_ about it?” he asked. “Oh—that spot; it’ll disappear in a

second.”

“It isn’t,” she said, after a moment of concentrated gazing,

“it’s still there—and it looks like Old Nick—oh, Amory, what’ll

we do! It’s _just_ the height of your shoulder.”

“Massage it,” he suggested, repressing the faintest inclination

to laugh.

She rubbed it delicately with the tips of her fingers, and then a

tear gathered in the corner of her eye, and slid down her cheek.

“Oh, Amory,” she said despairingly, lifting up a most pathetic

face, “I’ll just make my whole neck _flame_ if I rub it. What’ll

I do?”

A quotation sailed into his head and he couldn’t resist repeating

it aloud.

“All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this little hand.”

She looked up and the sparkle of the tear in her eye was like

ice.

“You’re not very sympathetic.”

Amory mistook her meaning.

“Isabelle, darling, I think it’ll—”

“Don’t touch me!” she cried. “Haven’t I enough on my mind and you

stand there and _laugh!_”

Then he slipped again.

“Well, it _is_ funny, Isabelle, and we were talking the other day

about a sense of humor being—”

She was looking at him with something that was not a smile,

rather the faint, mirthless echo of a smile, in the corners of

her mouth.

“Oh, shut up!” she cried suddenly, and fled down the hallway

toward her room. Amory stood there, covered with remorseful

confusion.

“Damn!”

When Isabelle reappeared she had thrown a light wrap about her

shoulders, and they descended the stairs in a silence that

endured through dinner.

“Isabelle,” he began rather testily, as they arranged themselves

in the car, bound for a dance at the Greenwich Country Club,

“you’re angry, and I’ll be, too, in a minute. Let’s kiss and make

up.”

Isabelle considered glumly.

“I hate to be laughed at,” she said finally.

“I won’t laugh any more. I’m not laughing now, am I?”

“You did.”

“Oh, don’t be so darned feminine.”

Her lips curled slightly.

“I’ll be anything I want.”

Amory kept his temper with difficulty. He became aware that he

had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness

piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then

he knew he could leave in the morning and not care. On the

contrary, if he didn’t kiss her, it would worry him.... It would

interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror. It

wasn’t dignified to come off second best, _pleading_, with a

doughty warrior like Isabelle.

Perhaps she suspected this. At any rate, Amory watched the night

that should have been the consummation of romance glide by with

great moths overhead and the heavy fragrance of roadside gardens,

but without those broken words, those little sighs....

Afterward they suppered on ginger ale and devil’s food in the

pantry, and Amory announced a decision.

“I’m leaving early in the morning.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” he countered.

“There’s no need.”

“However, I’m going.”

“Well, if you insist on being ridiculous—”

“Oh, don’t put it that way,” he objected.

“—just because I won’t let you kiss me. Do you think—”

“Now, Isabelle,” he interrupted, “you know it’s not that—even

suppose it is. We’ve reached the stage where we either ought to

kiss—or—or—nothing. It isn’t as if you were refusing on moral

grounds.”

She hesitated.

“I really don’t know what to think about you,” she began, in a

feeble, perverse attempt at conciliation. “You’re so funny.”

“How?”

“Well, I thought you had a lot of self-confidence and all that;

remember you told me the other day that you could do anything you

wanted, or get anything you wanted?”

Amory flushed. He _had_ told her a lot of things.

“Yes.”

“Well, you didn’t seem to feel so self-confident to-night. Maybe

you’re just plain conceited.”

“No, I’m not,” he hesitated. “At Princeton—”

“Oh, you and Princeton! You’d think that was the world, the way

you talk! Perhaps you _can_ write better than anybody else on

your old Princetonian; maybe the freshmen _do_ think you’re

important—”

“You don’t understand—”

“Yes, I do,” she interrupted. “I _do_, because you’re always

talking about yourself and I used to like it; now I don’t.”

“Have I to-night?”

“That’s just the point,” insisted Isabelle. “You got all upset

to-night. You just sat and watched my eyes. Besides, I have to

think all the time I’m talking to you—you’re so critical.”

“I make you think, do I?” Amory repeated with a touch of vanity.

“You’re a nervous strain”—this emphatically—“and when you analyze

every little emotion and instinct I just don’t have ’em.”

“I know.” Amory admitted her point and shook his head helplessly.

“Let’s go.” She stood up.

He rose abstractedly and they walked to the foot of the stairs.

“What train can I get?”

“There’s one about 9:11 if you really must go.”

“Yes, I’ve got to go, really. Good night.”

“Good night.”

They were at the head of the stairs, and as Amory turned into his

room he thought he caught just the faintest cloud of discontent

in her face. He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much

he cared—how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt

vanity—whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for

romance.

When he awoke, it was with a glad flood of consciousness. The

early wind stirred the chintz curtains at the windows and he was

idly puzzled not to be in his room at Princeton with his school

football picture over the bureau and the Triangle Club on the

wall opposite. Then the grandfather’s clock in the hall outside

struck eight, and the memory of the night before came to him. He

was out of bed, dressing, like the wind; he must get out of the

house before he saw Isabelle. What had seemed a melancholy

happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. He was dressed at

half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of

his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an

ironic mockery the morning seemed!—bright and sunny, and full of

the smell of the garden; hearing Mrs. Borge’s voice in the

sun-parlor below, he wondered where was Isabelle.

There was a knock at the door.

“The car will be around at ten minutes of nine, sir.”

He returned to his contemplation of the outdoors, and began

repeating over and over, mechanically, a verse from Browning,

which he had once quoted to Isabelle in a letter:

“Each life unfulfilled, you see, It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;

We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted,

despaired—been happy.”

But his life would not be unfulfilled. He took a sombre

satisfaction in thinking that perhaps all along she had been

nothing except what he had read into her; that this was her high

point, that no one else would ever make her think. Yet that was

what she had objected to in him; and Amory was suddenly tired of

thinking, thinking!

“Damn her!” he said bitterly, “she’s spoiled my year!”

THE SUPERMAN GROWS CARELESS

On a dusty day in September Amory arrived in Princeton and joined

the sweltering crowd of conditioned men who thronged the streets.

It seemed a stupid way to commence his upper-class years, to

spend four hours a morning in the stuffy room of a tutoring

school, imbibing the infinite boredom of conic sections. Mr.

Rooney, pander to the dull, conducted the class and smoked

innumerable Pall Malls as he drew diagrams and worked equations

from six in the morning until midnight.

“Now, Langueduc, if I used that formula, where would my A point

be?”

Langueduc lazily shifts his six-foot-three of football material

and tries to concentrate.

“Oh—ah—I’m damned if I know, Mr. Rooney.”

“Oh, why of course, of course you can’t _use_ that formula.

_That’s_ what I wanted you to say.”

“Why, sure, of course.”

“Do you see why?”

“You bet—I suppose so.”

“If you don’t see, tell me. I’m here to show you.”

“Well, Mr. Rooney, if you don’t mind, I wish you’d go over that

again.”

“Gladly. Now here’s ‘A’...”

The room was a study in stupidity—two huge stands for paper, Mr.

Rooney in his shirt-sleeves in front of them, and slouched around

on chairs, a dozen men: Fred Sloane, the pitcher, who absolutely

_had_ to get eligible; “Slim” Langueduc, who would beat Yale this

fall, if only he could master a poor fifty per cent; McDowell,

gay young sophomore, who thought it was quite a sporting thing to

be tutoring here with all these prominent athletes.

“Those poor birds who haven’t a cent to tutor, and have to study

during the term are the ones I pity,” he announced to Amory one

day, with a flaccid camaraderie in the droop of the cigarette

from his pale lips. “I should think it would be such a bore,

there’s so much else to do in New York during the term. I suppose

they don’t know what they miss, anyhow.” There was such an air of

“you and I” about Mr. McDowell that Amory very nearly pushed him

out of the open window when he said this. ... Next February his

mother would wonder why he didn’t make a club and increase his

allowance... simple little nut....

Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that

filled the room would come the inevitable helpless cry:

“I don’t get it! Repeat that, Mr. Rooney!” Most of them were so

stupid or careless that they wouldn’t admit when they didn’t

understand, and Amory was of the latter. He found it impossible

to study conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing

respectability breathing defiantly through Mr. Rooney’s fetid

parlors distorted their equations into insoluble anagrams. He

made a last night’s effort with the proverbial wet towel, and

then blissfully took the exam, wondering unhappily why all the

color and ambition of the spring before had faded out. Somehow,

with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate success

had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a

possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even

though it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the

Princetonian board and the slaughter of his chances for the

Senior Council.

There was always his luck.

He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered

from the room.

“If you don’t pass it,” said the newly arrived Alec as they sat

on the window-seat of Amory’s room and mused upon a scheme of

wall decoration, “you’re the world’s worst goopher. Your stock

will go down like an elevator at the club and on the campus.”

“Oh, hell, I know it. Why rub it in?”

“’Cause you deserve it. Anybody that’d risk what you were in line

for _ought_ to be ineligible for Princetonian chairman.”

“Oh, drop the subject,” Amory protested. “Watch and wait and shut

up. I don’t want every one at the club asking me about it, as if

I were a prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show.” One

evening a week later Amory stopped below his own window on the

way to Renwick’s, and, seeing a light, called up:

“Oh, Tom, any mail?”

Alec’s head appeared against the yellow square of light.

“Yes, your result’s here.”

His heart clamored violently.

“What is it, blue or pink?”

“Don’t know. Better come up.”

He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then

suddenly noticed that there were other people in the room.

“’Lo, Kerry.” He was most polite. “Ah, men of Princeton.” They

seemed to be mostly friends, so he picked up the envelope marked

“Registrar’s Office,” and weighed it nervously.

“We have here quite a slip of paper.”

“Open it, Amory.”

“Just to be dramatic, I’ll let you know that if it’s blue, my

name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my

short career is over.”

He paused, and then saw for the first time Ferrenby’s eyes,

wearing a hungry look and watching him eagerly. Amory returned

the gaze pointedly.

“Watch my face, gentlemen, for the primitive emotions.”

He tore it open and held the slip up to the light.

“Well?”

“Pink or blue?”

“Say what it is.”

“We’re all ears, Amory.”

“Smile or swear—or something.”

There was a pause... a small crowd of seconds swept by... then he

looked again and another crowd went on into time.

“Blue as the sky, gentlemen....”

AFTERMATH

What Amory did that year from early September to late in the

spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems

scarcely worth recording. He was, of course, immediately sorry

for what he had lost. His philosophy of success had tumbled down

upon him, and he looked for the reasons.

“Your own laziness,” said Alec later.

“No—something deeper than that. I’ve begun to feel that I was

meant to lose this chance.”

“They’re rather off you at the club, you know; every man that

doesn’t come through makes our crowd just so much weaker.”

“I hate that point of view.”

“Of course, with a little effort you could still stage a

comeback.”

“No—I’m through—as far as ever being a power in college is

concerned.”

“But, Amory, honestly, what makes me the angriest isn’t the fact

that you won’t be chairman of the Prince and on the Senior

Council, but just that you didn’t get down and pass that exam.”

“Not me,” said Amory slowly; “I’m mad at the concrete thing. My

own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck

broke.”

“Your system broke, you mean.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, what are you going to do? Get a better one quick, or just

bum around for two more years as a has-been?”

“I don’t know yet...”

“Oh, Amory, buck up!”

“Maybe.”

Amory’s point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the

true one. If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated,

the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his

earliest years:

1. The fundamental Amory.

2. Amory plus Beatrice.

3. Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis.

Then St. Regis’ had pulled him to pieces and started him over

again:

4. Amory plus St. Regis’.

5. Amory plus St. Regis’ plus Princeton.

That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity.

The fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been

nearly snowed under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as

his imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own

success, he had listlessly, half-accidentally chucked the whole

thing and become again:

6. The fundamental Amory.

FINANCIAL

His father died quietly and inconspicuously at Thanksgiving. The

incongruity of death with either the beauties of Lake Geneva or

with his mother’s dignified, reticent attitude diverted him, and

he looked at the funeral with an amused tolerance. He decided

that burial was after all preferable to cremation, and he smiled

at his old boyhood choice, slow oxidation in the top of a tree.

The day after the ceremony he was amusing himself in the great

library by sinking back on a couch in graceful mortuary

attitudes, trying to determine whether he would, when his day

came, be found with his arms crossed piously over his chest

(Monsignor Darcy had once advocated this posture as being the

most distinguished), or with his hands clasped behind his head, a

more pagan and Byronic attitude.

What interested him much more than the final departure of his

father from things mundane was a tri-cornered conversation

between Beatrice, Mr. Barton, of Barton and Krogman, their

lawyers, and himself, that took place several days after the

funeral. For the first time he came into actual cognizance of the

family finances, and realized what a tidy fortune had once been

under his father’s management. He took a ledger labelled “1906”

and ran through it rather carefully. The total expenditure that

year had come to something over one hundred and ten thousand

dollars. Forty thousand of this had been Beatrice’s own income,

and there had been no attempt to account for it: it was all under

the heading, “Drafts, checks, and letters of credit forwarded to

Beatrice Blaine.” The dispersal of the rest was rather minutely

itemized: the taxes and improvements on the Lake Geneva estate

had come to almost nine thousand dollars; the general up-keep,

including Beatrice’s electric and a French car, bought that year,

was over thirty-five thousand dollars. The rest was fully taken

care of, and there were invariably items which failed to balance

on the right side of the ledger.

In the volume for 1912 Amory was shocked to discover the decrease

in the number of bond holdings and the great drop in the income.

In the case of Beatrice’s money this was not so pronounced, but

it was obvious that his father had devoted the previous year to

several unfortunate gambles in oil. Very little of the oil had

been burned, but Stephen Blaine had been rather badly singed. The

next year and the next and the next showed similar decreases, and

Beatrice had for the first time begun using her own money for

keeping up the house. Yet her doctor’s bill for 1913 had been

over nine thousand dollars.

About the exact state of things Mr. Barton was quite vague and

confused. There had been recent investments, the outcome of which

was for the present problematical, and he had an idea there were

further speculations and exchanges concerning which he had not

been consulted.

It was not for several months that Beatrice wrote Amory the full

situation. The entire residue of the Blaine and O’Hara fortunes

consisted of the place at Lake Geneva and approximately a half

million dollars, invested now in fairly conservative six-per-cent

holdings. In fact, Beatrice wrote that she was putting the money

into railroad and street-car bonds as fast as she could

conveniently transfer it.

“I am quite sure,” she wrote to Amory, “that if there is one thing we

can be positive of, it is that people will not stay in one place.

This Ford person has certainly made the most of that idea. So I am

instructing Mr. Barton to specialize on such things as Northern

Pacific and these Rapid Transit Companies, as they call the

street-cars. I shall never forgive myself for not buying Bethlehem

Steel. I’ve heard the most fascinating stories. You must go into

finance, Amory. I’m sure you would revel in it. You start as a

messenger or a teller, I believe, and from that you go up—almost

indefinitely. I’m sure if I were a man I’d love the handling of

money; it has become quite a senile passion with me. Before I get any

farther I want to discuss something. A Mrs. Bispam, an overcordial

little lady whom I met at a tea the other day, told me that her son,

he is at Yale, wrote her that all the boys there wore their summer

underwear all during the winter, and also went about with their heads

wet and in low shoes on the coldest days. Now, Amory, I don’t know

whether that is a fad at Princeton too, but I don’t want you to be so

foolish. It not only inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile

paralysis, but to all forms of lung trouble, to which you are

particularly inclined. You cannot experiment with your health. I

have found that out. I will not make myself ridiculous as some

mothers no doubt do, by insisting that you wear overshoes, though I

remember one Christmas you wore them around constantly without a

single buckle latched, making such a curious swishing sound, and you

refused to buckle them because it was not the thing to do. The very

next Christmas you would not wear even rubbers, though I begged you.

You are nearly twenty years old now, dear, and I can’t be with you

constantly to find whether you are doing the sensible thing.

“This has been a very _practical_ letter. I warned you in my last

that the lack of money to do the things one wants to makes one quite

prosy and domestic, but there is still plenty for everything if we

are not too extravagant. Take care of yourself, my dear boy, and do

try to write at least _once_ a week, because I imagine all sorts of

horrible things if I don’t hear from you. Affectionately,

MOTHER.”

FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE TERM “PERSONAGE”

Monsignor Darcy invited Amory up to the Stuart palace on the

Hudson for a week at Christmas, and they had enormous

conversations around the open fire. Monsignor was growing a

trifle stouter and his personality had expanded even with that,

and Amory felt both rest and security in sinking into a squat,

cushioned chair and joining him in the middle-aged sanity of a

cigar.

“I’ve felt like leaving college, Monsignor.”

“Why?”

“All my career’s gone up in smoke; you think it’s petty and all

that, but—”

“Not at all petty. I think it’s most important. I want to hear

the whole thing. Everything you’ve been doing since I saw you

last.”

Amory talked; he went thoroughly into the destruction of his

egotistic highways, and in a half-hour the listless quality had

left his voice.

“What would you do if you left college?” asked Monsignor.

“Don’t know. I’d like to travel, but of course this tiresome war

prevents that. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate.

I’m just at sea. Kerry Holiday wants me to go over with him and

join the Lafayette Esquadrille.”

“You know you wouldn’t like to go.”

“Sometimes I would—to-night I’d go in a second.”

“Well, you’d have to be very much more tired of life than I think

you are. I know you.”

“I’m afraid you do,” agreed Amory reluctantly. “It just seemed an

easy way out of everything—when I think of another useless,

draggy year.”

“Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I’m not worried about

you; you seem to me to be progressing perfectly naturally.”

“No,” Amory objected. “I’ve lost half my personality in a year.”

“Not a bit of it!” scoffed Monsignor. “You’ve lost a great amount

of vanity and that’s all.”

“Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I’d gone through another fifth form

at St. Regis’s.”

“No.” Monsignor shook his head. “That was a misfortune; this has

been a good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won’t be

through the channels you were searching last year.”

“What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?”

“Perhaps in itself... but you’re developing. This has given you

time to think and you’re casting off a lot of your old luggage

about success and the superman and all. People like us can’t

adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing,

and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels,

but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is

concerned—we’d just make asses of ourselves.”

“But, Monsignor, I can’t do the next thing.”

“Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it

myself. I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing,

but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on

mathematics this fall.”

“Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of

thing I should do.”

“We have to do it because we’re not personalities, but

personages.”

“That’s a good line—what do you mean?”

“A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and

Sloane you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical

matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen

it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active,

it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other

hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done.

He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering

things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a

cold mentality back of them.”

“And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off

when I needed them.” Amory continued the simile eagerly.

“Yes, that’s it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and

talents and all that are hung out, you need never bother about

anybody; you can cope with them without difficulty.”

“But, on the other hand, if I haven’t my possessions, I’m

helpless!”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s certainly an idea.”

“Now you’ve a clean start—a start Kerry or Sloane can

constitutionally never have. You brushed three or four ornaments

down, and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them. The

thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look

ahead in the collecting the better. But remember, do the next

thing!”

“How clear you can make things!”

So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy

and religion, and life as respectively a game or a mystery. The

priest seemed to guess Amory’s thoughts before they were clear in

his own head, so closely related were their minds in form and

groove.

“Why do I make lists?” Amory asked him one night. “Lists of all

sorts of things?”

“Because you’re a mediaevalist,” Monsignor answered. “We both

are. It’s the passion for classifying and finding a type.”

“It’s a desire to get something definite.”

“It’s the nucleus of scholastic philosophy.”

“I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up

here. It was a pose, I guess.”

“Don’t worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest

pose of all. Pose—”

“Yes?”

“But do the next thing.”

After Amory returned to college he received several letters from

Monsignor which gave him more egotistic food for consumption.

I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable

safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in your

springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will arrive

without struggle. Some nuances of character you will have to take

for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in confessing

them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable of

affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud.

Don’t let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really

be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t

worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it;

at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will

begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are

my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.

If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. Your last,

that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful— so “highbrow”

that I picture you living in an intellectual and emotional vacuum;

and beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types;

you will find that all through their youth they will persist

annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a

supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a

Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to

come into really antagonistic contact with the world. An

idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a more

valuable beacon to you at present.

You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do

keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise

don’t blame yourself too much.

You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this

“woman proposition”; but it’s more than that, Amory; it’s the fear

that what you begin you can’t stop; you would run amuck, and I know

whereof I speak; it’s that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you

detect evil, it’s the half-realized fear of God in your heart.

Whatever your metier proves to be—religion, architecture,

literature—I’m sure you would be much safer anchored to the Church,

but I won’t risk my influence by arguing with you even though I am

secretly sure that the “black chasm of Romanism” yawns beneath you.

Do write me soon.

With affectionate regards, THAYER DARCY.

Even Amory’s reading paled during this period; he delved further

into the misty side streets of literature: Huysmans, Walter

Pater, Theophile Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais,

Boccaccio, Petronius, and Suetonius. One week, through general

curiosity, he inspected the private libraries of his classmates

and found Sloane’s as typical as any: sets of Kipling, O. Henry,

John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis; “What Every Middle-Aged

Woman Ought to Know,” “The Spell of the Yukon”; a “gift” copy of

James Whitcomb Riley, an assortment of battered, annotated

schoolbooks, and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own late

discoveries, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke.

Together with Tom D’Invilliers, he sought among the lights of

Princeton for some one who might found the Great American Poetic

Tradition.

The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that

year than had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years

before. Things had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice

of much of the spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old

Princeton they would never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie.

Tanaduke was a sophomore, with tremendous ears and a way of

saying, “The earth swirls down through the ominous moons of

preconsidered generations!” that made them vaguely wonder why it

did not sound quite clear, but never question that it was the

utterance of a supersoul. At least so Tom and Amory took him.

They told him in all earnestness that he had a mind like

Shelley’s, and featured his ultrafree free verse and prose poetry

in the Nassau Literary Magazine. But Tanaduke’s genius absorbed

the many colors of the age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to

their great disappointment. He talked of Greenwich Village now

instead of “noon-swirled moons,” and met winter muses,

unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway,

instead of the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had regaled

their expectant appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to the

futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better

there. Tom gave him the final advice that he should stop writing

for two years and read the complete works of Alexander Pope four

times, but on Amory’s suggestion that Pope for Tanaduke was like

foot-ease for stomach trouble, they withdrew in laughter, and

called it a coin’s toss whether this genius was too big or too

petty for them.

Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who

dispensed easy epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups

of admirers every night. He was disappointed, too, at the air of

general uncertainty on every subject that seemed linked with the

pedantic temperament; his opinions took shape in a miniature

satire called “In a Lecture-Room,” which he persuaded Tom to

print in the Nassau Lit.

“Good-morning, Fool... Three times a week You hold us helpless while

you speak, Teasing our thirsty souls with the Sleek ‘yeas’ of your

philosophy... Well, here we are, your hundred sheep, Tune up, play

on, pour forth... we sleep... You are a student, so they say; You

hammered out the other day A syllabus, from what we know Of some

forgotten folio; You’d sniffled through an era’s must, Filling your

nostrils up with dust, And then, arising from your knees, Published,

in one gigantic sneeze... But here’s a neighbor on my right, An

Eager Ass, considered bright; Asker of questions.... How he’ll

stand, With earnest air and fidgy hand, After this hour, telling you

He sat all night and burrowed through Your book.... Oh, you’ll be

coy and he Will simulate precosity, And pedants both, you’ll smile

and smirk, And leer, and hasten back to work....

’Twas this day week, sir, you returned A theme of mine, from which

I learned (Through various comment on the side Which you had

scrawled) that I defied The _highest rules of criticism_ For

_cheap_ and _careless_ witticism.... ‘Are you quite sure that this

could be?’ And ‘Shaw is no authority!’ But Eager Ass, with what

he’s sent, Plays havoc with your best per cent.

Still—still I meet you here and there... When Shakespeare’s played

you hold a chair, And some defunct, moth-eaten star Enchants the

mental prig you are... A radical comes down and shocks The

atheistic orthodox? You’re representing Common Sense, Mouth open,

in the audience. And, sometimes, even chapel lures That conscious

tolerance of yours, That broad and beaming view of truth (Including

Kant and General Booth...) And so from shock to shock you live, A

hollow, pale affirmative...

The hour’s up... and roused from rest One hundred children of the

blest Cheat you a word or two with feet That down the noisy

aisle-ways beat... Forget on _narrow-minded earth_ The Mighty Yawn

that gave you birth.”

In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to

enroll in the Lafayette Esquadrille. Amory’s envy and admiration

of this step was drowned in an experience of his own to which he

never succeeded in giving an appropriate value, but which,

nevertheless, haunted him for three years afterward.

THE DEVIL

Healy’s they left at twelve and taxied to Bistolary’s. There were

Axia Marlowe and Phoebe Column, from the Summer Garden show, Fred

Sloane and Amory. The evening was so very young that they felt

ridiculous with surplus energy, and burst into the cafe like

Dionysian revellers.

“Table for four in the middle of the floor,” yelled Phoebe.

“Hurry, old dear, tell ’em we’re here!”

“Tell ’em to play ‘Admiration’!” shouted Sloane. “You two order;

Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf,” and they sailed

off in the muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an

hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage;

there they took seats and watched.

“There’s Findle Margotson, from New Haven!” she cried above the

uproar. “’Lo, Findle! Whoo-ee!”

“Oh, Axia!” he shouted in salutation. “C’mon over to our table.”

“No!” Amory whispered.

“Can’t do it, Findle; I’m with somebody else! Call me up

to-morrow about one o’clock!”

Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty’s, answered incoherently

and turned back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring

to steer around the room.

“There’s a natural damn fool,” commented Amory.

“Oh, he’s all right. Here’s the old jitney waiter. If you ask me,

I want a double Daiquiri.”

“Make it four.”

The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from

the colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway,

and women of two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl.

On the whole it was a typical crowd, and their party as typical

as any. About three-fourths of the whole business was for effect

and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the cafe, soon

enough for the five-o’clock train back to Yale or Princeton;

about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered

strange dust from strange places. Their party was scheduled to be

one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column were old

friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared

even in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in

the cafe, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to

spoil for him the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was

so inexpressibly terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he

never thought of it as experience; but it was a scene from a

misty tragedy, played far behind the veil, and that it meant

something definite he knew.

About one o’clock they moved to Maxim’s, and two found them in

Deviniere’s. Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a

state of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely

sober; they had run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers

of champagne who usually assisted their New York parties. They

were just through dancing and were making their way back to their

chairs when Amory became aware that some one at a near-by table

was looking at him. He turned and glanced casually... a

middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it was, sitting a

little apart at a table by himself and watching their party

intently. At Amory’s glance he smiled faintly. Amory turned to

Fred, who was just sitting down.

“Who’s that pale fool watching us?” he complained indignantly.

“Where?” cried Sloane. “We’ll have him thrown out!” He rose to

his feet and swayed back and forth, clinging to his chair. “Where

is he?”

Axia and Phoebe suddenly leaned and whispered to each other

across the table, and before Amory realized it they found

themselves on their way to the door.

“Where now?”

“Up to the flat,” suggested Phoebe. “We’ve got brandy and

fizz—and everything’s slow down here to-night.”

Amory considered quickly. He hadn’t been drinking, and decided

that if he took no more, it would be reasonably discreet for him

to trot along in the party. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the

thing to do in order to keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a

state to do his own thinking. So he took Axia’s arm and, piling

intimately into a taxicab, they drove out over the hundreds and

drew up at a tall, white-stone apartment-house. ... Never would

he forget that street.... It was a broad street, lined on both

sides with just such tall, white-stone buildings, dotted with

dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see,

flooded with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor.

He imagined each one to have an elevator and a colored hall-boy

and a key-rack; each one to be eight stories high and full of

three and four room suites. He was rather glad to walk into the

cheeriness of Phoebe’s living-room and sink onto a sofa, while

the girls went rummaging for food.

“Phoebe’s great stuff,” confided Sloane, sotto voce.

“I’m only going to stay half an hour,” Amory said sternly. He

wondered if it sounded priggish.

“Hell y’ say,” protested Sloane. “We’re here now—don’t le’s

rush.”

“I don’t like this place,” Amory said sulkily, “and I don’t want

any food.”

Phoebe reappeared with sandwiches, brandy bottle, siphon, and

four glasses.

“Amory, pour ’em out,” she said, “and we’ll drink to Fred Sloane,

who has a rare, distinguished edge.”

“Yes,” said Axia, coming in, “and Amory. I like Amory.” She sat

down beside him and laid her yellow head on his shoulder.

“I’ll pour,” said Sloane; “you use siphon, Phoebe.”

They filled the tray with glasses.

“Ready, here she goes!”

Amory hesitated, glass in hand.

There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm

wind, and his imagination turned to fire, and he took the glass

from Phoebe’s hand. That was all; for at the second that his

decision came, he looked up and saw, ten yards from him, the man

who had been in the cafe, and with his jump of astonishment the

glass fell from his uplifted hand. There the man half sat, half

leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan. His face

was cast in the same yellow wax as in the cafe, neither the dull,

pasty color of a dead man—rather a sort of virile pallor—nor

unhealthy, you’d have called it; but like a strong man who’d

worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate. Amory

looked him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after

a fashion, down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind

that is called frank, and he had steady gray eyes that moved

slowly from one to the other of their group, with just the shade

of a questioning expression. Amory noticed his hands; they

weren’t fine at all, but they had versatility and a tenuous

strength... they were nervous hands that sat lightly along the

cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and

closings. Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a

rush of blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet

were all wrong ... with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather

than knew.... It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on

satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little

things in the back of the brain. He wore no shoes, but, instead,

a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like the shoes they

wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends curling

up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them to

the end.... They were unutterably terrible....

He must have said something, or looked something, for Axia’s

voice came out of the void with a strange goodness.

“Well, look at Amory! Poor old Amory’s sick—old head going

’round?”

“Look at that man!” cried Amory, pointing toward the corner

divan.

“You mean that purple zebra!” shrieked Axia facetiously. “Ooo-ee!

Amory’s got a purple zebra watching him!”

Sloane laughed vacantly.

“Ole zebra gotcha, Amory?”

There was a silence.... The man regarded Amory quizzically....

Then the human voices fell faintly on his ear:

“Thought you weren’t drinking,” remarked Axia sardonically, but

her voice was good to hear; the whole divan that held the man was

alive; alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling

worms....

“Come back! Come back!” Axia’s arm fell on his. “Amory, dear, you

aren’t going, Amory!” He was half-way to the door.

“Come on, Amory, stick ’th us!”

“Sick, are you?”

“Sit down a second!”

“Take some water.”

“Take a little brandy....”

The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep,

paled to a livid bronze... Axia’s beseeching voice floated down

the shaft. Those feet... those feet...

As they settled to the lower floor the feet came into view in the

sickly electric light of the paved hall.

IN THE ALLEY

Down the long street came the moon, and Amory turned his back on

it and walked. Ten, fifteen steps away sounded the footsteps.

They were like a slow dripping, with just the slightest

insistence in their fall. Amory’s shadow lay, perhaps, ten feet

ahead of him, and soft shoes was presumably that far behind. With

the instinct of a child Amory edged in under the blue darkness of

the white buildings, cleaving the moonlight for haggard seconds,

once bursting into a slow run with clumsy stumblings. After that

he stopped suddenly; he must keep hold, he thought. His lips were

dry and he licked them.

If he met any one good—were there any good people left in the

world or did they all live in white apartment-houses now? Was

every one followed in the moonlight? But if he met some one good

who’d know what he meant and hear this damned scuffle... then the

scuffling grew suddenly nearer, and a black cloud settled over

the moon. When again the pale sheen skimmed the cornices, it was

almost beside him, and Amory thought he heard a quiet breathing.

Suddenly he realized that the footsteps were not behind, had

never been behind, they were ahead and he was not eluding but

following... following. He began to run, blindly, his heart

knocking heavily, his hands clinched. Far ahead a black dot

showed itself, resolved slowly into a human shape. But Amory was

beyond that now; he turned off the street and darted into an

alley, narrow and dark and smelling of old rottenness. He twisted

down a long, sinuous blackness, where the moonlight was shut away

except for tiny glints and patches... then suddenly sank panting

into a corner by a fence, exhausted. The steps ahead stopped, and

he could hear them shift slightly with a continuous motion, like

waves around a dock.

He put his face in his hands and covered eyes and ears as well as

he could. During all this time it never occurred to him that he

was delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as

material things could never give him. His intellectual content

seemed to submit passively to it, and it fitted like a glove

everything that had ever preceded it in his life. It did not

muddle him. It was like a problem whose answer he knew on paper,

yet whose solution he was unable to grasp. He was far beyond

horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of that, now moved

in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls were real,

living things, things he must accept. Only far inside his soul a

little fire leaped and cried that something was pulling him down,

trying to get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After

that door was slammed there would be only footfalls and white

buildings in the moonlight, and perhaps he would be one of the

footfalls.

During the five or ten minutes he waited in the shadow of the

fence, there was somehow this fire... that was as near as he

could name it afterward. He remembered calling aloud:

“I want some one stupid. Oh, send some one stupid!” This to the

black fence opposite him, in whose shadows the footsteps shuffled

... shuffled. He supposed “stupid” and “good” had become somehow

intermingled through previous association. When he called thus it

was not an act of will at all—will had turned him away from the

moving figure in the street; it was almost instinct that called,

just the pile on pile of inherent tradition or some wild prayer

from way over the night. Then something clanged like a low gong

struck at a distance, and before his eyes a face flashed over the

two feet, a face pale and distorted with a sort of infinite evil

that twisted it like flame in the wind; _but he knew, for the

half instant that the gong tanged and hummed, that it was the

face of Dick Humbird._

Minutes later he sprang to his feet, realizing dimly that there

was no more sound, and that he was alone in the graying alley. It

was cold, and he started on a steady run for the light that

showed the street at the other end.

AT THE WINDOW

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside

his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he

had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily,

his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast

in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory’s mind

was working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and

separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked his memory the

bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he

could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it

was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when

the air on Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how

little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he

apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping

Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw.

Then Broadway broke upon them, and with the babel of noise and

the painted faces a sudden sickness rushed over Amory.

“For God’s sake, let’s go back! Let’s get off of this—this

place!”

Sloane looked at him in amazement.

“What do you mean?”

“This street, it’s ghastly! Come on! let’s get back to the

Avenue!”

“Do you mean to say,” said Sloane stolidly, “that ’cause you had

some sort of indigestion that made you act like a maniac last

night, you’re never coming on Broadway again?”

Simultaneously Amory classed him with the crowd, and he seemed no

longer Sloane of the debonair humor and the happy personality,

but only one of the evil faces that whirled along the turbid

stream.

“Man!” he shouted so loud that the people on the corner turned

and followed them with their eyes, “it’s filthy, and if you can’t

see it, you’re filthy, too!”

“I can’t help it,” said Sloane doggedly. “What’s the matter with

you? Old remorse getting you? You’d be in a fine state if you’d

gone through with our little party.”

“I’m going, Fred,” said Amory slowly. His knees were shaking

under him, and he knew that if he stayed another minute on this

street he would keel over where he stood. “I’ll be at the

Vanderbilt for lunch.” And he strode rapidly off and turned over

to Fifth Avenue. Back at the hotel he felt better, but as he

walked into the barber-shop, intending to get a head massage, the

smell of the powders and tonics brought back Axia’s sidelong,

suggestive smile, and he left hurriedly. In the doorway of his

room a sudden blackness flowed around him like a divided river.

When he came to himself he knew that several hours had passed. He

pitched onto the bed and rolled over on his face with a deadly

fear that he was going mad. He wanted people, people, some one

sane and stupid and good. He lay for he knew not how long without

moving. He could feel the little hot veins on his forehead

standing out, and his terror had hardened on him like plaster. He

felt he was passing up again through the thin crust of horror,

and now only could he distinguish the shadowy twilight he was

leaving. He must have fallen asleep again, for when he next

recollected himself he had paid the hotel bill and was stepping

into a taxi at the door. It was raining torrents.

On the train for Princeton he saw no one he knew, only a crowd of

fagged-looking Philadelphians. The presence of a painted woman

across the aisle filled him with a fresh burst of sickness and he

changed to another car, tried to concentrate on an article in a

popular magazine. He found himself reading the same paragraphs

over and over, so he abandoned this attempt and leaning over

wearily pressed his hot forehead against the damp window-pane.

The car, a smoker, was hot and stuffy with most of the smells of

the state’s alien population; he opened a window and shivered

against the cloud of fog that drifted in over him. The two hours’

ride were like days, and he nearly cried aloud with joy when the

towers of Princeton loomed up beside him and the yellow squares

of light filtered through the blue rain.

Tom was standing in the centre of the room, pensively relighting

a cigar-stub. Amory fancied he looked rather relieved on seeing

him.

“Had a hell of a dream about you last night,” came in the cracked

voice through the cigar smoke. “I had an idea you were in some

trouble.”

“Don’t tell me about it!” Amory almost shrieked. “Don’t say a

word; I’m tired and pepped out.”

Tom looked at him queerly and then sank into a chair and opened

his Italian note-book. Amory threw his coat and hat on the floor,

loosened his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the

shelf. “Wells is sane,” he thought, “and if he won’t do I’ll read

Rupert Brooke.”

Half an hour passed. Outside the wind came up, and Amory started

as the wet branches moved and clawed with their finger-nails at

the window-pane. Tom was deep in his work, and inside the room

only the occasional scratch of a match or the rustle of leather

as they shifted in their chairs broke the stillness. Then like a

zigzag of lightning came the change. Amory sat bolt upright,

frozen cold in his chair. Tom was looking at him with his mouth

drooping, eyes fixed.

“God help us!” Amory cried.

“Oh, my heavens!” shouted Tom, “look behind!” Quick as a flash

Amory whirled around. He saw nothing but the dark window-pane.

“It’s gone now,” came Tom’s voice after a second in a still

terror. “Something was looking at you.”

Trembling violently, Amory dropped into his chair again.

“I’ve got to tell you,” he said. “I’ve had one hell of an

experience. I think I’ve—I’ve seen the devil or—something like

him. What face did you just see?—or no,” he added quickly, “don’t

tell me!”

And he gave Tom the story. It was midnight when he finished, and

after that, with all lights burning, two sleepy, shivering boys

read to each other from “The New Machiavelli,” until dawn came up

out of Witherspoon Hall, and the Princetonian fell against the

door, and the May birds hailed the sun on last night’s rain.

CHAPTER 4. Narcissus Off Duty

During Princeton’s transition period, that is, during Amory’s

last two years there, while he saw it change and broaden and live

up to its Gothic beauty by better means than night parades,

certain individuals arrived who stirred it to its plethoric

depths. Some of them had been freshmen, and wild freshmen, with

Amory; some were in the class below; and it was in the beginning

of his last year and around small tables at the Nassau Inn that

they began questioning aloud the institutions that Amory and

countless others before him had questioned so long in secret.

First, and partly by accident, they struck on certain books, a

definite type of biographical novel that Amory christened “quest”

books. In the “quest” book the hero set off in life armed with

the best weapons and avowedly intending to use them as such

weapons are usually used, to push their possessors ahead as

selfishly and blindly as possible, but the heroes of the “quest”

books discovered that there might be a more magnificent use for

them. “None Other Gods,” “Sinister Street,” and “The Research

Magnificent” were examples of such books; it was the latter of

these three that gripped Burne Holiday and made him wonder in the

beginning of senior year how much it was worth while being a

diplomatic autocrat around his club on Prospect Avenue and

basking in the high lights of class office. It was distinctly

through the channels of aristocracy that Burne found his way.

Amory, through Kerry, had had a vague drifting acquaintance with

him, but not until January of senior year did their friendship

commence.

“Heard the latest?” said Tom, coming in late one drizzly evening

with that triumphant air he always wore after a successful

conversational bout.

“No. Somebody flunked out? Or another ship sunk?”

“Worse than that. About one-third of the junior class are going

to resign from their clubs.”

“What!”

“Actual fact!”

“Why!”

“Spirit of reform and all that. Burne Holiday is behind it. The

club presidents are holding a meeting to-night to see if they can

find a joint means of combating it.”

“Well, what’s the idea of the thing?”

“Oh, clubs injurious to Princeton democracy; cost a lot; draw

social lines, take time; the regular line you get sometimes from

disappointed sophomores. Woodrow thought they should be abolished

and all that.”

“But this is the real thing?”

“Absolutely. I think it’ll go through.”

“For Pete’s sake, tell me more about it.”

“Well,” began Tom, “it seems that the idea developed

simultaneously in several heads. I was talking to Burne awhile

ago, and he claims that it’s a logical result if an intelligent

person thinks long enough about the social system. They had a

‘discussion crowd’ and the point of abolishing the clubs was

brought up by some one—everybody there leaped at it—it had been

in each one’s mind, more or less, and it just needed a spark to

bring it out.”

“Fine! I swear I think it’ll be most entertaining. How do they

feel up at Cap and Gown?”

“Wild, of course. Every one’s been sitting and arguing and

swearing and getting mad and getting sentimental and getting

brutal. It’s the same at all the clubs; I’ve been the rounds.

They get one of the radicals in the corner and fire questions at

him.”

“How do the radicals stand up?”

“Oh, moderately well. Burne’s a damn good talker, and so

obviously sincere that you can’t get anywhere with him. It’s so

evident that resigning from his club means so much more to him

than preventing it does to us that I felt futile when I argued;

finally took a position that was brilliantly neutral. In fact, I

believe Burne thought for a while that he’d converted me.”

“And you say almost a third of the junior class are going to

resign?”

“Call it a fourth and be safe.”

“Lord—who’d have thought it possible!”

There was a brisk knock at the door, and Burne himself came in.

“Hello, Amory—hello, Tom.”

Amory rose.

“’Evening, Burne. Don’t mind if I seem to rush; I’m going to

Renwick’s.”

Burne turned to him quickly.

“You probably know what I want to talk to Tom about, and it isn’t

a bit private. I wish you’d stay.”

“I’d be glad to.” Amory sat down again, and as Burne perched on a

table and launched into argument with Tom, he looked at this

revolutionary more carefully than he ever had before.

Broad-browed and strong-chinned, with a fineness in the honest

gray eyes that were like Kerry’s, Burne was a man who gave an

immediate impression of bigness and security—stubborn, that was

evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had

talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had

in it no quality of dilettantism.

The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from

the admiration he had had for Humbird. This time it began as

purely a mental interest. With other men of whom he had thought

as primarily first-class, he had been attracted first by their

personalities, and in Burne he missed that immediate magnetism to

which he usually swore allegiance. But that night Amory was

struck by Burne’s intense earnestness, a quality he was

accustomed to associate only with the dread stupidity, and by the

great enthusiasm that struck dead chords in his heart. Burne

stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward—and

it was almost time that land was in sight. Tom and Amory and Alec

had reached an impasse; never did they seem to have new

experiences in common, for Tom and Alec had been as blindly busy

with their committees and boards as Amory had been blindly

idling, and the things they had for dissection—college,

contemporary personality and the like—they had hashed and

rehashed for many a frugal conversational meal.

That night they discussed the clubs until twelve, and, in the

main, they agreed with Burne. To the roommates it did not seem

such a vital subject as it had in the two years before, but the

logic of Burne’s objections to the social system dovetailed so

completely with everything they had thought, that they questioned

rather than argued, and envied the sanity that enabled this man

to stand out so against all traditions.

Then Amory branched off and found that Burne was deep in other

things as well. Economics had interested him and he was turning

socialist. Pacifism played in the back of his mind, and he read

The Masses and Lyoff Tolstoi faithfully.

“How about religion?” Amory asked him.

“Don’t know. I’m in a muddle about a lot of things—I’ve just

discovered that I’ve a mind, and I’m starting to read.”

“Read what?”

“Everything. I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly

things to make me think. I’m reading the four gospels now, and

the ‘Varieties of Religious Experience.’”

“What chiefly started you?”

“Wells, I guess, and Tolstoi, and a man named Edward Carpenter.

I’ve been reading for over a year now—on a few lines, on what I

consider the essential lines.”

“Poetry?”

“Well, frankly, not what you call poetry, or for your reasons—you

two write, of course, and look at things differently. Whitman is

the man that attracts me.”

“Whitman?”

“Yes; he’s a definite ethical force.”

“Well, I’m ashamed to say that I’m a blank on the subject of

Whitman. How about you, Tom?”

Tom nodded sheepishly.

“Well,” continued Burne, “you may strike a few poems that are

tiresome, but I mean the mass of his work. He’s tremendous—like

Tolstoi. They both look things in the face, and, somehow,

different as they are, stand for somewhat the same things.”

“You have me stumped, Burne,” Amory admitted. “I’ve read ‘Anna

Karenina’ and the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ of course, but Tolstoi is

mostly in the original Russian as far as I’m concerned.”

“He’s the greatest man in hundreds of years,” cried Burne

enthusiastically. “Did you ever see a picture of that shaggy old

head of his?”

They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and

when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow

with ideas and a sense of shock that some one else had discovered

the path he might have followed. Burne Holiday was so evidently

developing—and Amory had considered that he was doing the same.

He had fallen into a deep cynicism over what had crossed his

path, plotted the imperfectability of man and read Shaw and

Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges of

decadence—now suddenly all his mental processes of the last year

and a half seemed stale and futile—a petty consummation of

himself... and like a sombre background lay that incident of the

spring before, that filled half his nights with a dreary terror

and made him unable to pray. He was not even a Catholic, yet that

was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic,

paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose

claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and

Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his

adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals—a Catholicism which

Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or

sacraments or sacrifice.

He could not sleep, so he turned on his reading-lamp and, taking

down the “Kreutzer Sonata,” searched it carefully for the germs

of Burne’s enthusiasm. Being Burne was suddenly so much realler

than being clever. Yet he sighed... here were other possible clay

feet.

He thought back through two years, of Burne as a hurried, nervous

freshman, quite submerged in his brother’s personality. Then he

remembered an incident of sophomore year, in which Burne had been

suspected of the leading role.

Dean Hollister had been heard by a large group arguing with a

taxi-driver, who had driven him from the junction. In the course

of the altercation the dean remarked that he “might as well buy

the taxicab.” He paid and walked off, but next morning he entered

his private office to find the taxicab itself in the space

usually occupied by his desk, bearing a sign which read “Property

of Dean Hollister. Bought and Paid for.”... It took two expert

mechanics half a day to dissemble it into its minutest parts and

remove it, which only goes to prove the rare energy of sophomore

humor under efficient leadership.

Then again, that very fall, Burne had caused a sensation. A

certain Phyllis Styles, an intercollegiate prom-trotter, had

failed to get her yearly invitation to the Harvard-Princeton

game.

Jesse Ferrenby had brought her to a smaller game a few weeks

before, and had pressed Burne into service—to the ruination of

the latter’s misogyny.

“Are you coming to the Harvard game?” Burne had asked

indiscreetly, merely to make conversation.

“If you ask me,” cried Phyllis quickly.

“Of course I do,” said Burne feebly. He was unversed in the arts

of Phyllis, and was sure that this was merely a vapid form of

kidding. Before an hour had passed he knew that he was indeed

involved. Phyllis had pinned him down and served him up, informed

him the train she was arriving by, and depressed him thoroughly.

Aside from loathing Phyllis, he had particularly wanted to stag

that game and entertain some Harvard friends.

“She’ll see,” he informed a delegation who arrived in his room to

josh him. “This will be the last game she ever persuades any

young innocent to take her to!”

“But, Burne—why did you _invite_ her if you didn’t want her?”

“Burne, you _know_ you’re secretly mad about her—that’s the

_real_ trouble.”

“What can _you_ do, Burne? What can _you_ do against Phyllis?”

But Burne only shook his head and muttered threats which

consisted largely of the phrase: “She’ll see, she’ll see!”

The blithesome Phyllis bore her twenty-five summers gayly from

the train, but on the platform a ghastly sight met her eyes.

There were Burne and Fred Sloane arrayed to the last dot like the

lurid figures on college posters. They had bought flaring suits

with huge peg-top trousers and gigantic padded shoulders. On

their heads were rakish college hats, pinned up in front and

sporting bright orange-and-black bands, while from their

celluloid collars blossomed flaming orange ties. They wore black

arm-bands with orange “P’s,” and carried canes flying Princeton

pennants, the effect completed by socks and peeping handkerchiefs

in the same color motifs. On a clanking chain they led a large,

angry tom-cat, painted to represent a tiger.

A good half of the station crowd was already staring at them,

torn between horrified pity and riotous mirth, and as Phyllis,

with her svelte jaw dropping, approached, the pair bent over and

emitted a college cheer in loud, far-carrying voices,

thoughtfully adding the name “Phyllis” to the end. She was

vociferously greeted and escorted enthusiastically across the

campus, followed by half a hundred village urchins—to the stifled

laughter of hundreds of alumni and visitors, half of whom had no

idea that this was a practical joke, but thought that Burne and

Fred were two varsity sports showing their girl a collegiate

time.

Phyllis’s feelings as she was paraded by the Harvard and

Princeton stands, where sat dozens of her former devotees, can be

imagined. She tried to walk a little ahead, she tried to walk a

little behind—but they stayed close, that there should be no

doubt whom she was with, talking in loud voices of their friends

on the football team, until she could almost hear her

acquaintances whispering:

“Phyllis Styles must be _awfully hard up_ to have to come with

_those two_.”

That had been Burne, dynamically humorous, fundamentally serious.

From that root had blossomed the energy that he was now trying to

orient with progress....

So the weeks passed and March came and the clay feet that Amory

looked for failed to appear. About a hundred juniors and seniors

resigned from their clubs in a final fury of righteousness, and

the clubs in helplessness turned upon Burne their finest weapon:

ridicule. Every one who knew him liked him—but what he stood for

(and he began to stand for more all the time) came under the lash

of many tongues, until a frailer man than he would have been

snowed under.

“Don’t you mind losing prestige?” asked Amory one night. They had

taken to exchanging calls several times a week.

“Of course I don’t. What’s prestige, at best?”

“Some people say that you’re just a rather original politician.”

He roared with laughter.

“That’s what Fred Sloane told me to-day. I suppose I have it

coming.”

One afternoon they dipped into a subject that had interested

Amory for a long time—the matter of the bearing of physical

attributes on a man’s make-up. Burne had gone into the biology of

this, and then:

“Of course health counts—a healthy man has twice the chance of

being good,” he said.

“I don’t agree with you—I don’t believe in ‘muscular

Christianity.’”

“I do—I believe Christ had great physical vigor.”

“Oh, no,” Amory protested. “He worked too hard for that. I

imagine that when he died he was a broken-down man—and the great

saints haven’t been strong.”

“Half of them have.”

“Well, even granting that, I don’t think health has anything to

do with goodness; of course, it’s valuable to a great saint to be

able to stand enormous strains, but this fad of popular preachers

rising on their toes in simulated virility, bellowing that

calisthenics will save the world—no, Burne, I can’t go that.”

“Well, let’s waive it—we won’t get anywhere, and besides I

haven’t quite made up my mind about it myself. Now, here’s

something I _do_ know—personal appearance has a lot to do with

it.”

“Coloring?” Amory asked eagerly.

“Yes.”

“That’s what Tom and I figured,” Amory agreed. “We took the

year-books for the last ten years and looked at the pictures of

the senior council. I know you don’t think much of that august

body, but it does represent success here in a general way. Well,

I suppose only about thirty-five per cent of every class here are

blonds, are really light—yet _two-thirds_ of every senior council

are light. We looked at pictures of ten years of them, mind you;

that means that out of every _fifteen_ light-haired men in the

senior class _one_ is on the senior council, and of the

dark-haired men it’s only one in _fifty_.”

“It’s true,” Burne agreed. “The light-haired man _is_ a higher

type, generally speaking. I worked the thing out with the

Presidents of the United States once, and found that way over

half of them were light-haired—yet think of the preponderant

number of brunettes in the race.”

“People unconsciously admit it,” said Amory. “You’ll notice a

blond person is _expected_ to talk. If a blond girl doesn’t talk

we call her a ‘doll’; if a light-haired man is silent he’s

considered stupid. Yet the world is full of ‘dark silent men’ and

‘languorous brunettes’ who haven’t a brain in their heads, but

somehow are never accused of the dearth.”

“And the large mouth and broad chin and rather big nose

undoubtedly make the superior face.”

“I’m not so sure.” Amory was all for classical features.

“Oh, yes—I’ll show you,” and Burne pulled out of his desk a

photographic collection of heavily bearded, shaggy

celebrities—Tolstoi, Whitman, Carpenter, and others.

“Aren’t they wonderful?”

Amory tried politely to appreciate them, and gave up laughingly.

“Burne, I think they’re the ugliest-looking crowd I ever came

across. They look like an old man’s home.”

“Oh, Amory, look at that forehead on Emerson; look at Tolstoi’s

eyes.” His tone was reproachful.

Amory shook his head.

“No! Call them remarkable-looking or anything you want—but ugly

they certainly are.”

Unabashed, Burne ran his hand lovingly across the spacious

foreheads, and piling up the pictures put them back in his desk.

Walking at night was one of his favorite pursuits, and one night

he persuaded Amory to accompany him.

“I hate the dark,” Amory objected. “I didn’t use to—except when I

was particularly imaginative, but now, I really do—I’m a regular

fool about it.”

“That’s useless, you know.”

“Quite possibly.”

“We’ll go east,” Burne suggested, “and down that string of roads

through the woods.”

“Doesn’t sound very appealing to me,” admitted Amory reluctantly,

“but let’s go.”

They set off at a good gait, and for an hour swung along in a

brisk argument until the lights of Princeton were luminous white

blots behind them.

“Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid,” said

Burne earnestly. “And this very walking at night is one of the

things I was afraid about. I’m going to tell you why I can walk

anywhere now and not be afraid.”

“Go on,” Amory urged eagerly. They were striding toward the

woods, Burne’s nervous, enthusiastic voice warming to his

subject.

“I used to come out here alone at night, oh, three months ago,

and I always stopped at that cross-road we just passed. There

were the woods looming up ahead, just as they do now, there were

dogs howling and the shadows and no human sound. Of course, I

peopled the woods with everything ghastly, just like you do;

don’t you?”

“I do,” Amory admitted.

“Well, I began analyzing it—my imagination persisted in sticking

horrors into the dark—so I stuck my imagination into the dark

instead, and let it look out at me—I let it play stray dog or

escaped convict or ghost, and then saw myself coming along the

road. That made it all right—as it always makes everything all

right to project yourself completely into another’s place. I knew

that if I were the dog or the convict or the ghost I wouldn’t be

a menace to Burne Holiday any more than he was a menace to me.

Then I thought of my watch. I’d better go back and leave it and

then essay the woods. No; I decided, it’s better on the whole

that I should lose a watch than that I should turn back—and I did

go into them—not only followed the road through them, but walked

into them until I wasn’t frightened any more—did it until one

night I sat down and dozed off in there; then I knew I was

through being afraid of the dark.”

“Lordy,” Amory breathed. “I couldn’t have done that. I’d have

come out half-way, and the first time an automobile passed and

made the dark thicker when its lamps disappeared, I’d have come

in.”

“Well,” Burne said suddenly, after a few moments’ silence, “we’re

half-way through, let’s turn back.”

On the return he launched into a discussion of will.

“It’s the whole thing,” he asserted. “It’s the one dividing line

between good and evil. I’ve never met a man who led a rotten life

and didn’t have a weak will.”

“How about great criminals?”

“They’re usually insane. If not, they’re weak. There is no such

thing as a strong, sane criminal.”

“Burne, I disagree with you altogether; how about the superman?”

“Well?”

“He’s evil, I think, yet he’s strong and sane.”

“I’ve never met him. I’ll bet, though, that he’s stupid or

insane.”

“I’ve met him over and over and he’s neither. That’s why I think

you’re wrong.”

“I’m sure I’m not—and so I don’t believe in imprisonment except

for the insane.”

On this point Amory could not agree. It seemed to him that life

and history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often

self-deluding; in politics and business one found him and among

the old statesmen and kings and generals; but Burne never agreed

and their courses began to split on that point.

Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about

him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took

to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He

voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology,

and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in

his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never

quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat;

and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point.

He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of

becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and

once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly,

his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the

romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights

where others would be forever unable to get a foothold.

“I tell you,” Amory declared to Tom, “he’s the first contemporary

I’ve ever met whom I’ll admit is my superior in mental capacity.”

“It’s a bad time to admit it—people are beginning to think he’s

odd.”

“He’s way over their heads—you know you think so yourself when

you talk to him—Good Lord, Tom, you _used_ to stand out against

‘people.’ Success has completely conventionalized you.”

Tom grew rather annoyed.

“What’s he trying to do—be excessively holy?”

“No! not like anybody you’ve ever seen. Never enters the

Philadelphian Society. He has no faith in that rot. He doesn’t

believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will

right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink

whenever he feels like it.”

“He certainly is getting in wrong.”

“Have you talked to him lately?”

“No.”

“Then you haven’t any conception of him.”

The argument ended nowhere, but Amory noticed more than ever how

the sentiment toward Burne had changed on the campus.

“It’s odd,” Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more

amicable on the subject, “that the people who violently

disapprove of Burne’s radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee

class—I mean they’re the best-educated men in college—the editors

of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger

professors.... The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he’s

getting eccentric, but they just say, ‘Good old Burne has got

some queer ideas in his head,’ and pass on—the Pharisee

class—Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully.”

The next morning he met Burne hurrying along McCosh walk after a

recitation.

“Whither bound, Tsar?”

“Over to the Prince office to see Ferrenby,” he waved a copy of

the morning’s Princetonian at Amory. “He wrote this editorial.”

“Going to flay him alive?”

“No—but he’s got me all balled up. Either I’ve misjudged him or

he’s suddenly become the world’s worst radical.”

Burne hurried on, and it was several days before Amory heard an

account of the ensuing conversation. Burne had come into the

editor’s sanctum displaying the paper cheerfully.

“Hello, Jesse.”

“Hello there, Savonarola.”

“I just read your editorial.”

“Good boy—didn’t know you stooped that low.”

“Jesse, you startled me.”

“How so?”

“Aren’t you afraid the faculty’ll get after you if you pull this

irreligious stuff?”

“What?”

“Like this morning.”

“What the devil—that editorial was on the coaching system.”

“Yes, but that quotation—”

Jesse sat up.

“What quotation?”

“You know: ‘He who is not with me is against me.’”

“Well—what about it?”

Jesse was puzzled but not alarmed.

“Well, you say here—let me see.” Burne opened the paper and read:

“‘_He who is not with me is against me_, as that gentleman said

who was notoriously capable of only coarse distinctions and

puerile generalities.’”

“What of it?” Ferrenby began to look alarmed. “Oliver Cromwell

said it, didn’t he? or was it Washington, or one of the saints?

Good Lord, I’ve forgotten.”

Burne roared with laughter.

“Oh, Jesse, oh, good, kind Jesse.”

“Who said it, for Pete’s sake?”

“Well,” said Burne, recovering his voice, “St. Matthew attributes

it to Christ.”

“My God!” cried Jesse, and collapsed backward into the

waste-basket.

AMORY WRITES A POEM

The weeks tore by. Amory wandered occasionally to New York on the

chance of finding a new shining green auto-bus, that its

stick-of-candy glamour might penetrate his disposition. One day

he ventured into a stock-company revival of a play whose name was

faintly familiar. The curtain rose—he watched casually as a girl

entered. A few phrases rang in his ear and touched a faint chord

of memory. Where—? When—?

Then he seemed to hear a voice whispering beside him, a very

soft, vibrant voice: “Oh, I’m such a poor little fool; _do_ tell

me when I do wrong.”

The solution came in a flash and he had a quick, glad memory of

Isabelle.

He found a blank space on his programme, and began to scribble

rapidly:

“Here in the figured dark I watch once more, There, with the

curtain, roll the years away; Two years of years—there was an idle

day Of ours, when happy endings didn’t bore Our unfermented souls; I

could adore Your eager face beside me, wide-eyed, gay, Smiling a

repertoire while the poor play Reached me as a faint ripple reaches

shore.

“Yawning and wondering an evening through, I watch alone... and

chatterings, of course, Spoil the one scene which, somehow, _did_

have charms; You wept a bit, and I grew sad for you Right here!

Where Mr. X defends divorce And What’s-Her-Name falls fainting in

his arms.”

STILL CALM

“Ghosts are such dumb things,” said Alec, “they’re slow-witted. I

can always outguess a ghost.”

“How?” asked Tom.

“Well, it depends where. Take a bedroom, for example. If you use

_any_ discretion a ghost can never get you in a bedroom.”

“Go on, s’pose you think there’s maybe a ghost in your

bedroom—what measures do you take on getting home at night?”

demanded Amory, interested.

“Take a stick” answered Alec, with ponderous reverence, “one

about the length of a broom-handle. Now, the first thing to do is

to get the room _cleared_—to do this you rush with your eyes

closed into your study and turn on the lights—next, approaching

the closet, carefully run the stick in the door three or four

times. Then, if nothing happens, you can look in. _Always,

always_ run the stick in viciously first—_never_ look first!”

“Of course, that’s the ancient Celtic school,” said Tom gravely.

“Yes—but they usually pray first. Anyway, you use this method to

clear the closets and also for behind all doors—”

“And the bed,” Amory suggested.

“Oh, Amory, no!” cried Alec in horror. “That isn’t the way—the

bed requires different tactics—let the bed alone, as you value

your reason—if there is a ghost in the room and that’s only about

a third of the time, it is _almost always_ under the bed.”

“Well” Amory began.

Alec waved him into silence.

“Of _course_ you never look. You stand in the middle of the floor

and before he knows what you’re going to do make a sudden leap

for the bed—never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is

your most vulnerable part—once in bed, you’re safe; he may lie

around under the bed all night, but you’re safe as daylight. If

you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.”

“All that’s very interesting, Tom.”

“Isn’t it?” Alec beamed proudly. “All my own, too—the Sir Oliver

Lodge of the new world.”

Amory was enjoying college immensely again. The sense of going

forward in a direct, determined line had come back; youth was

stirring and shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored

enough surplus energy to sally into a new pose.

“What’s the idea of all this ‘distracted’ stuff, Amory?” asked

Alec one day, and then as Amory pretended to be cramped over his

book in a daze: “Oh, don’t try to act Burne, the mystic, to me.”

Amory looked up innocently.

“What?”

“What?” mimicked Alec. “Are you trying to read yourself into a

rhapsody with—let’s see the book.”

He snatched it; regarded it derisively.

“Well?” said Amory a little stiffly.

“‘The Life of St. Teresa,’” read Alec aloud. “Oh, my gosh!”

“Say, Alec.”

“What?”

“Does it bother you?”

“Does what bother me?”

“My acting dazed and all that?”

“Why, no—of course it doesn’t _bother_ me.”

“Well, then, don’t spoil it. If I enjoy going around telling

people guilelessly that I think I’m a genius, let me do it.”

“You’re getting a reputation for being eccentric,” said Alec,

laughing, “if that’s what you mean.”

Amory finally prevailed, and Alec agreed to accept his face value

in the presence of others if he was allowed rest periods when

they were alone; so Amory “ran it out” at a great rate, bringing

the most eccentric characters to dinner, wild-eyed grad students,

preceptors with strange theories of God and government, to the

cynical amazement of the supercilious Cottage Club.

As February became slashed by sun and moved cheerfully into

March, Amory went several times to spend week-ends with

Monsignor; once he took Burne, with great success, for he took

equal pride and delight in displaying them to each other.

Monsignor took him several times to see Thornton Hancock, and

once or twice to the house of a Mrs. Lawrence, a type of

Rome-haunting American whom Amory liked immediately.

Then one day came a letter from Monsignor, which appended an

interesting P. S.:

“Do you know,” it ran, “that your third cousin, Clara Page, widowed

six months and very poor, is living in Philadelphia? I don’t think

you’ve ever met her, but I wish, as a favor to me, you’d go to see

her. To my mind, she’s rather a remarkable woman, and just about

your age.”

Amory sighed and decided to go, as a favor....

CLARA

She was immemorial.... Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara

of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was

above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull

literature of female virtue.

Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in

Philadelphia he thought her steely blue eyes held only happiness;

a latent strength, a realism, was brought to its fullest

development by the facts that she was compelled to face. She was

alone in the world, with two small children, little money, and,

worst of all, a host of friends. He saw her that winter in

Philadelphia entertaining a houseful of men for an evening, when

he knew she had not a servant in the house except the little

colored girl guarding the babies overhead. He saw one of the

greatest libertines in that city, a man who was habitually drunk

and notorious at home and abroad, sitting opposite her for an

evening, discussing _girls’ boarding-schools_ with a sort of

innocent excitement. What a twist Clara had to her mind! She

could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of

the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.

The idea that the girl was poverty-stricken had appealed to

Amory’s sense of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting

to be told that 921 Ark Street was in a miserable lane of hovels.

He was even disappointed when it proved to be nothing of the

sort. It was an old house that had been in her husband’s family

for years. An elderly aunt, who objected to having it sold, had

put ten years’ taxes with a lawyer and pranced off to Honolulu,

leaving Clara to struggle with the heating-problem as best she

could. So no wild-haired woman with a hungry baby at her breast

and a sad Amelia-like look greeted him. Instead, Amory would have

thought from his reception that she had not a care in the world.

A calm virility and a dreamy humor, marked contrasts to her

level-headedness—into these moods she slipped sometimes as a

refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise

enough never to stultify herself with such “household arts” as

_knitting_ and _embroidery_), yet immediately afterward pick up a

book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the

wind. Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance

that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room

throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so

she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her,

until she made of her prosy old uncle a man of quaint and

meditative charm, metamorphosed the stray telegraph boy into a

Puck-like creature of delightful originality. At first this

quality of hers somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own

uniqueness sufficient, and it rather embarrassed him when she

tried to read new interests into him for the benefit of what

other adorers were present. He felt as if a polite but insistent

stage-manager were attempting to make him give a new

interpretation of a part he had conned for years.

But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and

an inebriated man and herself.... People tried afterward to

repeat her anecdotes but for the life of them they could make

them sound like nothing whatever. They gave her a sort of

innocent attention and the best smiles many of them had smiled

for long; there were few tears in Clara, but people smiled

misty-eyed at her.

Very occasionally Amory stayed for little half-hours after the

rest of the court had gone, and they would have bread and jam and

tea late in the afternoon or “maple-sugar lunches,” as she called

them, at night.

“You _are_ remarkable, aren’t you!” Amory was becoming trite from

where he perched in the centre of the dining-room table one six

o’clock.

“Not a bit,” she answered. She was searching out napkins in the

sideboard. “I’m really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those

people who have no interest in anything but their children.”

“Tell that to somebody else,” scoffed Amory. “You know you’re

perfectly effulgent.” He asked her the one thing that he knew

might embarrass her. It was the remark that the first bore made

to Adam.

“Tell me about yourself.” And she gave the answer that Adam must

have given.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

But eventually Adam probably told the bore all the things he

thought about at night when the locusts sang in the sandy grass,

and he must have remarked patronizingly how _different_ he was

from Eve, forgetting how different she was from him... at any

rate, Clara told Amory much about herself that evening. She had

had a harried life from sixteen on, and her education had stopped

sharply with her leisure. Browsing in her library, Amory found a

tattered gray book out of which fell a yellow sheet that he

impudently opened. It was a poem that she had written at school

about a gray convent wall on a gray day, and a girl with her

cloak blown by the wind sitting atop of it and thinking about the

many-colored world. As a rule such sentiment bored him, but this

was done with so much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought

a picture of Clara to his mind, of Clara on such a cool, gray day

with her keen blue eyes staring out, trying to see her tragedies

come marching over the gardens outside. He envied that poem. How

he would have loved to have come along and seen her on the wall

and talked nonsense or romance to her, perched above him in the

air. He began to be frightfully jealous of everything about

Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and women who

flocked to drink deep of her cool kindness and rest their tired

minds as at an absorbing play.

“_Nobody_ seems to bore you,” he objected.

“About half the world do,” she admitted, “but I think that’s a

pretty good average, don’t you?” and she turned to find something

in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he

ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in

the middle of the conversation, and yet not be irritating to

distraction. She did it constantly, with such a serious

enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent

over a book, brow wrinkled ever so little at hunting her

sentence.

Through early March he took to going to Philadelphia for

week-ends. Almost always there was some one else there and she

seemed not anxious to see him alone, for many occasions presented

themselves when a word from her would have given him another

delicious half-hour of adoration. But he fell gradually in love

and began to speculate wildly on marriage. Though this design

flowed through his brain even to his lips, still he knew

afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he

dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in

his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone

out of her hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her

changeling tongue. But she was the first fine woman he ever knew

and one of the few good people who ever interested him. She made

her goodness such an asset. Amory had decided that most good

people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else

distorted it to artificial geniality, and of course there were

the ever-present prig and Pharisee—(but Amory never included

_them_ as being among the saved).

ST. CECILIA

“Over her gray and velvet dress, Under her molten, beaten hair,

Color of rose in mock distress Flushes and fades and makes her fair;

Fills the air from her to him With light and languor and little

sighs, Just so subtly he scarcely knows... Laughing lightning, color

of rose.”

“Do you like me?”

“Of course I do,” said Clara seriously.

“Why?”

“Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are

spontaneous in each of us—or were originally.”

“You’re implying that I haven’t used myself very well?”

Clara hesitated.

“Well, I can’t judge. A man, of course, has to go through a lot

more, and I’ve been sheltered.”

“Oh, don’t stall, please, Clara,” Amory interrupted; “but do talk

about me a little, won’t you?”

“Surely, I’d adore to.” She didn’t smile.

“That’s sweet of you. First answer some questions. Am I painfully

conceited?”

“Well—no, you have tremendous vanity, but it’ll amuse the people

who notice its preponderance.”

“I see.”

“You’re really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of

depression when you think you’ve been slighted. In fact, you

haven’t much self-respect.”

“Centre of target twice, Clara. How do you do it? You never let

me say a word.”

“Of course not—I can never judge a man while he’s talking. But

I’m not through; the reason you have so little real

self-confidence, even though you gravely announce to the

occasional philistine that you think you’re a genius, is that

you’ve attributed all sorts of atrocious faults to yourself and

are trying to live up to them. For instance, you’re always saying

that you are a slave to high-balls.”

“But I am, potentially.”

“And you say you’re a weak character, that you’ve no will.”

“Not a bit of will—I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my

hatred of boredom, to most of my desires—”

“You are not!” She brought one little fist down onto the other.

“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the

world, your imagination.”

“You certainly interest me. If this isn’t boring you, go on.”

“I notice that when you want to stay over an extra day from

college you go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first

while the merits of going or staying are fairly clear in your

mind. You let your imagination shinny on the side of your desires

for a few hours, and then you decide. Naturally your imagination,

after a little freedom, thinks up a million reasons why you

should stay, so your decision when it comes isn’t true. It’s

biassed.”

“Yes,” objected Amory, “but isn’t it lack of will-power to let my

imagination shinny on the wrong side?”

“My dear boy, there’s your big mistake. This has nothing to do

with will-power; that’s a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack

judgment—the judgment to decide at once when you know your

imagination will play you false, given half a chance.”

“Well, I’ll be darned!” exclaimed Amory in surprise, “that’s the

last thing I expected.”

Clara didn’t gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she

had started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He

felt like a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of

dishonesty finds that his own son, in the office, is changing the

books once a week. His poor, mistreated will that he had been

holding up to the scorn of himself and his friends, stood before

him innocent, and his judgment walked off to prison with the

unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee beside

him. Clara’s was the only advice he ever asked without dictating

the answer himself—except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor

Darcy.

How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with

her was a rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had

ever traded she was whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.

“I’ll bet she won’t stay single long.”

“Well, don’t scream it out. She ain’t lookin’ for no advice.”

“_Ain’t_ she beautiful!”

(Enter a floor-walker—silence till he moves forward, smirking.)

“Society person, ain’t she?”

“Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say.”

“Gee! girls, _ain’t_ she some kid!”

And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople

gave her discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes

without it. He knew she dressed very well, had always the best of

everything in the house, and was inevitably waited upon by the

head floor-walker at the very least.

Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would

walk beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water

in the new air. She was very devout, always had been, and God

knows what heights she attained and what strength she drew down

to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the

stained-glass light.

“St. Cecelia,” he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and

the people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon

and Clara and Amory turned to fiery red.

That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that

night. He couldn’t help it.

They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm

as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he

must speak.

“I think,” he said and his voice trembled, “that if I lost faith

in you I’d lose faith in God.”

She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the

matter.

“Nothing,” she said slowly, “only this: five men have said that

to me before, and it frightens me.”

“Oh, Clara, is that your fate!”

She did not answer.

“I suppose love to you is—” he began.

She turned like a flash.

“I have never been in love.”

They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told

him... never in love.... She seemed suddenly a daughter of light

alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to

touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have

had of Mary’s eternal significance. But quite mechanically he

heard himself saying:

“And I love you—any latent greatness that I’ve got is... oh, I

can’t talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position

to marry you—”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said; “I’d never marry again. I’ve got my two children

and I want myself for them. I like you—I like all clever men, you

more than any—but you know me well enough to know that I’d never

marry a clever man—” She broke off suddenly.

“Amory.”

“What?”

“You’re not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did

you?”

“It was the twilight,” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t feel as

though I were speaking aloud. But I love you—or adore you—or

worship you—”

“There you go—running through your catalogue of emotions in five

seconds.”

He smiled unwillingly.

“Don’t make me out such a light-weight, Clara; you _are_

depressing sometimes.”

“You’re not a light-weight, of all things,” she said intently,

taking his arm and opening wide her eyes—he could see their

kindliness in the fading dusk. “A light-weight is an eternal

nay.”

“There’s so much spring in the air—there’s so much lazy sweetness

in your heart.”

She dropped his arm.

“You’re all fine now, and I feel glorious. Give me a cigarette.

You’ve never seen me smoke, have you? Well, I do, about once a

month.”

And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like

two mad children gone wild with pale-blue twilight.

“I’m going to the country for to-morrow,” she announced, as she

stood panting, safe beyond the flare of the corner lamp-post.

“These days are too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel

them more in the city.”

“Oh, Clara!” Amory said; “what a devil you could have been if the

Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!”

“Maybe,” she answered; “but I think not. I’m never really wild

and never have been. That little outburst was pure spring.”

“And you are, too,” said he.

They were walking along now.

“No—you’re wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed

brains be so constantly wrong about me? I’m the opposite of

everything spring ever stood for. It’s unfortunate, if I happen

to look like what pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I

assure you that if it weren’t for my face I’d be a quiet nun in

the convent without”—then she broke into a run and her raised

voice floated back to him as he followed—“my precious babies,

which I must go back and see.”

She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand

how another man might be preferred. Often Amory met wives whom he

had known as debutantes, and looking intently at them imagined

that he found something in their faces which said:

“Oh, if I could only have gotten _you!_” Oh, the enormous conceit

of the man!

But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara’s

bright soul still gleamed on the ways they had trod.

“Golden, golden is the air—” he chanted to the little pools of

water. ... “Golden is the air, golden notes from golden

mandolins, golden frets of golden violins, fair, oh, wearily

fair.... Skeins from braided basket, mortals may not hold; oh,

what young extravagant God, who would know or ask it?... who

could give such gold...”

AMORY IS RESENTFUL

Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while

Amory talked and dreamed, war rolled swiftly up the beach and

washed the sands where Princeton played. Every night the

gymnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor

and shuffled out the basket-ball markings. When Amory went to

Washington the next week-end he caught some of the spirit of

crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back,

for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking

aliens—Greeks, he guessed, or Russians. He thought how much

easier patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much easier

it would have been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as the

Confederacy fought. And he did no sleeping that night, but

listened to the aliens guffaw and snore while they filled the car

with the heavy scent of latest America.

In Princeton every one bantered in public and told themselves

privately that their deaths at least would be heroic. The

literary students read Rupert Brooke passionately; the

lounge-lizards worried over whether the government would permit

the English-cut uniform for officers; a few of the hopelessly

lazy wrote to the obscure branches of the War Department, seeking

an easy commission and a soft berth.

Then, after a week, Amory saw Burne and knew at once that

argument would be futile—Burne had come out as a pacifist. The

socialist magazines, a great smattering of Tolstoi, and his own

intense longing for a cause that would bring out whatever

strength lay in him, had finally decided him to preach peace as a

subjective ideal.

“When the German army entered Belgium,” he began, “if the

inhabitants had gone peaceably about their business, the German

army would have been disorganized in—”

“I know,” Amory interrupted, “I’ve heard it all. But I’m not

going to talk propaganda with you. There’s a chance that you’re

right—but even so we’re hundreds of years before the time when

non-resistance can touch us as a reality.”

“But, Amory, listen—”

“Burne, we’d just argue—”

“Very well.”

“Just one thing—I don’t ask you to think of your family or

friends, because I know they don’t count a picayune with you

beside your sense of duty—but, Burne, how do you know that the

magazines you read and the societies you join and these idealists

you meet aren’t just plain _German?_”

“Some of them are, of course.”

“How do you know they aren’t _all_ pro-German—just a lot of weak

ones—with German-Jewish names.”

“That’s the chance, of course,” he said slowly. “How much or how

little I’m taking this stand because of propaganda I’ve heard, I

don’t know; naturally I think that it’s my most innermost

conviction—it seems a path spread before me just now.”

Amory’s heart sank.

“But think of the cheapness of it—no one’s really going to martyr

you for being a pacifist—it’s just going to throw you in with the

worst—”

“I doubt it,” he interrupted.

“Well, it all smells of Bohemian New York to me.”

“I know what you mean, and that’s why I’m not sure I’ll agitate.”

“You’re one man, Burne—going to talk to people who won’t

listen—with all God’s given you.”

“That’s what Stephen must have thought many years ago. But he

preached his sermon and they killed him. He probably thought as

he was dying what a waste it all was. But you see, I’ve always

felt that Stephen’s death was the thing that occurred to Paul on

the road to Damascus, and sent him to preach the word of Christ

all over the world.”

“Go on.”

“That’s all—this is my particular duty. Even if right now I’m

just a pawn—just sacrificed. God! Amory—you don’t think I like

the Germans!”

“Well, I can’t say anything else—I get to the end of all the

logic about non-resistance, and there, like an excluded middle,

stands the huge spectre of man as he is and always will be. And

this spectre stands right beside the one logical necessity of

Tolstoi’s, and the other logical necessity of Nietzsche’s—” Amory

broke off suddenly. “When are you going?”

“I’m going next week.”

“I’ll see you, of course.”

As he walked away it seemed to Amory that the look in his face

bore a great resemblance to that in Kerry’s when he had said

good-by under Blair Arch two years before. Amory wondered

unhappily why he could never go into anything with the primal

honesty of those two.

“Burne’s a fanatic,” he said to Tom, “and he’s dead wrong and,

I’m inclined to think, just an unconscious pawn in the hands of

anarchistic publishers and German-paid rag wavers—but he haunts

me—just leaving everything worth while—”

Burne left in a quietly dramatic manner a week later. He sold all

his possessions and came down to the room to say good-by, with a

battered old bicycle, on which he intended to ride to his home in

Pennsylvania.

“Peter the Hermit bidding farewell to Cardinal Richelieu,”

suggested Alec, who was lounging in the window-seat as Burne and

Amory shook hands.

But Amory was not in a mood for that, and as he saw Burne’s long

legs propel his ridiculous bicycle out of sight beyond Alexander

Hall, he knew he was going to have a bad week. Not that he

doubted the war—Germany stood for everything repugnant to him;

for materialism and the direction of tremendous licentious force;

it was just that Burne’s face stayed in his memory and he was

sick of the hysteria he was beginning to hear.

“What on earth is the use of suddenly running down Goethe,” he

declared to Alec and Tom. “Why write books to prove he started

the war—or that that stupid, overestimated Schiller is a demon in

disguise?”

“Have you ever read anything of theirs?” asked Tom shrewdly.

“No,” Amory admitted.

“Neither have I,” he said laughing.

“People will shout,” said Alec quietly, “but Goethe’s on his same

old shelf in the library—to bore any one that wants to read him!”

Amory subsided, and the subject dropped.

“What are you going to do, Amory?”

“Infantry or aviation, I can’t make up my mind—I hate mechanics,

but then of course aviation’s the thing for me—”

“I feel as Amory does,” said Tom. “Infantry or aviation—aviation

sounds like the romantic side of the war, of course—like cavalry

used to be, you know; but like Amory I don’t know a horse-power

from a piston-rod.”

Somehow Amory’s dissatisfaction with his lack of enthusiasm

culminated in an attempt to put the blame for the whole war on

the ancestors of his generation... all the people who cheered for

Germany in 1870.... All the materialists rampant, all the

idolizers of German science and efficiency. So he sat one day in

an English lecture and heard “Locksley Hall” quoted and fell into

a brown study with contempt for Tennyson and all he stood for—for

he took him as a representative of the Victorians.

Victorians, Victorians, who never learned to weep Who sowed the

bitter harvest that your children go to reap—

scribbled Amory in his note-book. The lecturer was saying

something about Tennyson’s solidity and fifty heads were bent to

take notes. Amory turned over to a fresh page and began scrawling

again.

“They shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about, They

shuddered when the waltz came in and Newman hurried out—”

But the waltz came in much earlier; he crossed that out.

“And entitled A Song in the Time of Order,” came the professor’s

voice, droning far away. “Time of Order”—Good Lord! Everything

crammed in the box and the Victorians sitting on the lid smiling

serenely.... With Browning in his Italian villa crying bravely:

“All’s for the best.” Amory scribbled again.

“You knelt up in the temple and he bent to hear you pray, You thanked

him for your ‘glorious gains’—reproached him for ‘Cathay.’”

Why could he never get more than a couplet at a time? Now he

needed something to rhyme with:

“You would keep Him straight with science, tho He had gone wrong

before...”

Well, anyway....

“You met your children in your home—‘I’ve fixed it up!’ you cried,

Took your fifty years of Europe, and then virtuously—died.”

“That was to a great extent Tennyson’s idea,” came the lecturer’s

voice. “Swinburne’s Song in the Time of Order might well have

been Tennyson’s title. He idealized order against chaos, against

waste.”

At last Amory had it. He turned over another page and scrawled

vigorously for the twenty minutes that was left of the hour. Then

he walked up to the desk and deposited a page torn out of his

note-book.

“Here’s a poem to the Victorians, sir,” he said coldly.

The professor picked it up curiously while Amory backed rapidly

through the door.

Here is what he had written:

“Songs in the time of order You left for us to sing, Proofs with

excluded middles, Answers to life in rhyme, Keys of the prison

warder And ancient bells to ring, Time was the end of riddles, We

were the end of time...

Here were domestic oceans And a sky that we might reach, Guns and a

guarded border, Gantlets—but not to fling, Thousands of old

emotions And a platitude for each, Songs in the time of order— And

tongues, that we might sing.”

THE END OF MANY THINGS

Early April slipped by in a haze—a haze of long evenings on the

club veranda with the graphophone playing “Poor Butterfly”

inside... for “Poor Butterfly” had been the song of that last

year. The war seemed scarcely to touch them and it might have

been one of the senior springs of the past, except for the

drilling every other afternoon, yet Amory realized poignantly

that this was the last spring under the old regime.

“This is the great protest against the superman,” said Amory.

“I suppose so,” Alec agreed.

“He’s absolutely irreconcilable with any Utopia. As long as he

occurs, there’s trouble and all the latent evil that makes a

crowd list and sway when he talks.”

“And of course all that he is is a gifted man without a moral

sense.”

“That’s all. I think the worst thing to contemplate is this—it’s

all happened before, how soon will it happen again? Fifty years

after Waterloo Napoleon was as much a hero to English school

children as Wellington. How do we know our grandchildren won’t

idolize Von Hindenburg the same way?”

“What brings it about?”

“Time, damn it, and the historian. If we could only learn to look

on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or

magnificence.”

“God! Haven’t we raked the universe over the coals for four

years?”

Then the night came that was to be the last. Tom and Amory, bound

in the morning for different training-camps, paced the shadowy

walks as usual and seemed still to see around them the faces of

the men they knew.

“The grass is full of ghosts to-night.”

“The whole campus is alive with them.”

They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver

of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees.

“You know,” whispered Tom, “what we feel now is the sense of all

the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred

years.”

A last burst of singing flooded up from Blair Arch—broken voices

for some long parting.

“And what we leave here is more than this class; it’s the whole

heritage of youth. We’re just one generation—we’re breaking all

the links that seemed to bind us here to top-booted and

high-stocked generations. We’ve walked arm and arm with Burr and

Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights.”

“That’s what they are,” Tom tangented off, “deep blue—a bit of

color would spoil them, make them exotic. Spires, against a sky

that’s a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofs—it

hurts... rather—”

“Good-by, Aaron Burr,” Amory called toward deserted Nassau Hall,

“you and I knew strange corners of life.”

His voice echoed in the stillness.

“The torches are out,” whispered Tom. “Ah, Messalina, the long

shadows are building minarets on the stadium—”

For an instant the voices of freshman year surged around them and

then they looked at each other with faint tears in their eyes.

“Damn!”

“Damn!”

The last light fades and drifts across the land—the low, long

land, the sunny land of spires; the ghosts of evening tune again

their lyres and wander singing in a plaintive band down the long

corridors of trees; pale fires echo the night from tower top to

tower: Oh, sleep that dreams, and dream that never tires, press

from the petals of the lotus flower something of this to keep,

the essence of an hour.

No more to wait the twilight of the moon in this sequestered vale

of star and spire, for one eternal morning of desire passes to

time and earthy afternoon. Here, Heraclitus, did you find in fire

and shifting things the prophecy you hurled down the dead years;

this midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers,

furled in flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.

INTERLUDE

May, 1917-February, 1919

A letter dated January, 1918, written by Monsignor Darcy to

Amory, who is a second lieutenant in the 171st Infantry, Port of

Embarkation, Camp Mills, Long Island.

MY DEAR BOY:

All you need tell me of yourself is that you still are; for the

rest I merely search back in a restive memory, a thermometer that

records only fevers, and match you with what I was at your age.

But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our

futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly

curtain falls _plump!_ upon our bobbing heads. But you are

starting the spluttering magic-lantern show of life with much the

same array of slides as I had, so I need to write you if only to

shriek the colossal stupidity of people....

This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never

again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we

meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard,

much harder than mine ever grew, nourished as they were on the

stuff of the nineties.

Amory, lately I reread Aeschylus and there in the divine irony of

the “Agamemnon” I find the only answer to this bitter age—all the

world tumbled about our ears, and the closest parallel ages back

in that hopeless resignation. There are times when I think of the

men out there as Roman legionaries, miles from their corrupt

city, stemming back the hordes... hordes a little more menacing,

after all, than the corrupt city... another blind blow at the

race, furies that we passed with ovations years ago, over whose

corpses we bleated triumphantly all through the Victorian era....

And afterward an out-and-out materialistic world—and the Catholic

Church. I wonder where you’ll fit in. Of one thing I’m

sure—Celtic you’ll live and Celtic you’ll die; so if you don’t

use heaven as a continual referendum for your ideas you’ll find

earth a continual recall to your ambitions.

Amory, I’ve discovered suddenly that I’m an old man. Like all old

men, I’ve had dreams sometimes and I’m going to tell you of them.

I’ve enjoyed imagining that you were my son, that perhaps when I

was young I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I

came to, had no recollection of it... it’s the paternal instinct,

Amory—celibacy goes deeper than the flesh....

Sometimes I think that the explanation of our deep resemblance is

some common ancestor, and I find that the only blood that the

Darcys and the O’Haras have in common is that of the

O’Donahues... Stephen was his name, I think....

When the lightning strikes one of us it strikes both: you had

hardly arrived at the port of embarkation when I got my papers to

start for Rome, and I am waiting every moment to be told where to

take ship. Even before you get this letter I shall be on the

ocean; then will come your turn. You went to war as a gentleman

should, just as you went to school and college, because it was

the thing to do. It’s better to leave the blustering and

tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.

Do you remember that week-end last March when you brought Burne

Holiday from Princeton to see me? What a magnificent boy he is!

It gave me a frightful shock afterward when you wrote that he

thought me splendid; how could he be so deceived? Splendid is the

one thing that neither you nor I are. We are many other

things—we’re extraordinary, we’re clever, we could be said, I

suppose, to be brilliant. We can attract people, we can make

atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celtic

subtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but

splendid—rather not!

I am going to Rome with a wonderful dossier and letters of

introduction that cover every capital in Europe, and there will

be “no small stir” when I get there. How I wish you were with me!

This sounds like a rather cynical paragraph, not at all the sort

of thing that a middle-aged clergyman should write to a youth

about to depart for the war; the only excuse is that the

middle-aged clergyman is talking to himself. There are deep

things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. We have

great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a

terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above

all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really

malicious.

I have written a keen for you which follows. I am sorry your

cheeks are not up to the description I have written of them, but

you _will_ smoke and read all night—

At any rate here it is:

A Lament for a Foster Son, and He going to the War Against the

King of Foreign.

“Ochone He is gone from me the son of my mind And he in his golden

youth like Angus Oge Angus of the bright birds And his mind strong and

subtle like the mind of Cuchulin on Muirtheme.

Awirra sthrue His brow is as white as the milk of the cows of Maeve

And his cheeks like the cherries of the tree And it bending down to

Mary and she feeding the Son of God.

Aveelia Vrone His hair is like the golden collar of the Kings at Tara

And his eyes like the four gray seas of Erin. And they swept with the

mists of rain.

Mavrone go Gudyo He to be in the joyful and red battle Amongst the

chieftains and they doing great deeds of valor His life to go from

him It is the chords of my own soul would be loosed.

A Vich Deelish My heart is in the heart of my son And my life is in

his life surely A man can be twice young In the life of his sons

only.

Jia du Vaha Alanav May the Son of God be above him and beneath him,

before him and behind him May the King of the elements cast a mist

over the eyes of the King of Foreign, May the Queen of the Graces

lead him by the hand the way he can go through the midst of his

enemies and they not seeing him

May Patrick of the Gael and Collumb of the Churches and the five

thousand Saints of Erin be better than a shield to him And he got

into the fight. Och Ochone.”

Amory—Amory—I feel, somehow, that this is all; one or both of us

is not going to last out this war.... I’ve been trying to tell

you how much this reincarnation of myself in you has meant in the

last few years... curiously alike we are... curiously unlike.

Good-by, dear boy, and God be with you. THAYER DARCY.

EMBARKING AT NIGHT

Amory moved forward on the deck until he found a stool under an

electric light. He searched in his pocket for note-book and

pencil and then began to write, slowly, laboriously:

“We leave to-night... Silent, we filled the still, deserted street, A

column of dim gray, And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat Along

the moonless way; The shadowy shipyards echoed to the feet That turned

from night and day.

And so we linger on the windless decks, See on the spectre shore

Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks... Oh, shall we

then deplore Those futile years! See how the sea is white! The

clouds have broken and the heavens burn To hollow highways, paved

with gravelled light The churning of the waves about the stern

Rises to one voluminous nocturne, ... We leave to-night.”

A letter from Amory, headed “Brest, March 11th, 1919,” to

Lieutenant T. P. D’Invilliers, Camp Gordon, Ga.

DEAR BAUDELAIRE:—

We meet in Manhattan on the 30th of this very mo.; we then

proceed to take a very sporty apartment, you and I and Alec, who

is at me elbow as I write. I don’t know what I’m going to do but

I have a vague dream of going into politics. Why is it that the

pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into

politics and in the U. S. A. we leave it to the muckers?—raised

in the ward, educated in the assembly and sent to Congress,

fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of “both ideas and

ideals” as the debaters used to say. Even forty years ago we had

good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a

million and “show what we are made of.” Sometimes I wish I’d been

an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and

healthy.

Since poor Beatrice died I’ll probably have a little money, but

very darn little. I can forgive mother almost everything except

the fact that in a sudden burst of religiosity toward the end,

she left half of what remained to be spent in stained-glass

windows and seminary endowments. Mr. Barton, my lawyer, writes me

that my thousands are mostly in street railways and that the said

Street R.R. s are losing money because of the five-cent fares.

Imagine a salary list that gives $350 a month to a man that can’t

read and write!—yet I believe in it, even though I’ve seen what

was once a sizable fortune melt away between speculation,

extravagance, the democratic administration, and the income

tax—modern, that’s me all over, Mabel.

At any rate we’ll have really knock-out rooms—you can get a job

on some fashion magazine, and Alec can go into the Zinc Company

or whatever it is that his people own—he’s looking over my

shoulder and he says it’s a brass company, but I don’t think it

matters much, do you? There’s probably as much corruption in

zinc-made money as brass-made money. As for the well-known Amory,

he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough about

anything to risk telling any one else about it. There is no more

dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned

platitudes.

Tom, why don’t you become a Catholic? Of course to be a good one

you’d have to give up those violent intrigues you used to tell me

about, but you’d write better poetry if you were linked up to

tall golden candlesticks and long, even chants, and even if the

American priests are rather burgeois, as Beatrice used to say,

still you need only go to the sporty churches, and I’ll introduce

you to Monsignor Darcy who really is a wonder.

Kerry’s death was a blow, so was Jesse’s to a certain extent. And

I have a great curiosity to know what queer corner of the world

has swallowed Burne. Do you suppose he’s in prison under some

false name? I confess that the war instead of making me orthodox,

which is the correct reaction, has made me a passionate agnostic.

The Catholic Church has had its wings clipped so often lately

that its part was timidly negligible, and they haven’t any good

writers any more. I’m sick of Chesterton.

I’ve only discovered one soldier who passed through the

much-advertised spiritual crisis, like this fellow, Donald

Hankey, and the one I knew was already studying for the ministry,

so he was ripe for it. I honestly think that’s all pretty much

rot, though it seemed to give sentimental comfort to those at

home; and may make fathers and mothers appreciate their children.

This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at

best. I think four men have discovered Paris to one that

discovered God.

But us—you and me and Alec—oh, we’ll get a Jap butler and dress

for dinner and have wine on the table and lead a contemplative,

emotionless life until we decide to use machine-guns with the

property owners—or throw bombs with the Bolshevik God! Tom, I

hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a

horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.

The place at Lake Geneva is now for rent but when I land I’m

going West to see Mr. Barton and get some details. Write me care

of the Blackstone, Chicago.

S’ever, dear Boswell,

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

BOOK TWO—The Education of a Personage

CHAPTER 1. The Debutante

The time is February. The place is a large, dainty bedroom in the

Connage house on Sixty-eighth Street, New York. A girl’s room:

pink walls and curtains and a pink bedspread on a cream-colored

bed. Pink and cream are the motifs of the room, but the only

article of furniture in full view is a luxurious dressing-table

with a glass top and a three-sided mirror. On the walls there is

an expensive print of “Cherry Ripe,” a few polite dogs by

Landseer, and the “King of the Black Isles,” by Maxfield Parrish.

Great disorder consisting of the following items: (1) seven or

eight empty cardboard boxes, with tissue-paper tongues hanging

panting from their mouths; (2) an assortment of street dresses

mingled with their sisters of the evening, all upon the table,

all evidently new; (3) a roll of tulle, which has lost its

dignity and wound itself tortuously around everything in sight,

and (4) upon the two small chairs, a collection of lingerie that

beggars description. One would enjoy seeing the bill called forth

by the finery displayed and one is possessed by a desire to see

the princess for whose benefit—Look! There’s some one!

Disappointment! This is only a maid hunting for something—she

lifts a heap from a chair—Not there; another heap, the

dressing-table, the chiffonier drawers. She brings to light

several beautiful chemises and an amazing pajama but this does

not satisfy her—she goes out.

An indistinguishable mumble from the next room.

Now, we are getting warm. This is Alec’s mother, Mrs. Connage,

ample, dignified, rouged to the dowager point and quite worn out.

Her lips move significantly as she looks for IT. Her search is

less thorough than the maid’s but there is a touch of fury in it,

that quite makes up for its sketchiness. She stumbles on the

tulle and her “damn” is quite audible. She retires, empty-handed.

More chatter outside and a girl’s voice, a very spoiled voice,

says: “Of all the stupid people—”

After a pause a third seeker enters, not she of the spoiled

voice, but a younger edition. This is Cecelia Connage, sixteen,

pretty, shrewd, and constitutionally good-humored. She is dressed

for the evening in a gown the obvious simplicity of which

probably bores her. She goes to the nearest pile, selects a small

pink garment and holds it up appraisingly.

CECELIA: Pink?

ROSALIND: (Outside) Yes!

CECELIA: _Very_ snappy?

ROSALIND: Yes!

CECELIA: I’ve got it!

(She sees herself in the mirror of the dressing-table and

commences to shimmy enthusiastically.)

ROSALIND: (Outside) What are you doing—trying it on?

(CECELIA ceases and goes out carrying the garment at the right

shoulder.

From the other door, enters ALEC CONNAGE. He looks around quickly

and in a huge voice shouts: Mama! There is a chorus of protest

from next door and encouraged he starts toward it, but is

repelled by another chorus.)

ALEC: So _that’s_ where you all are! Amory Blaine is here.

CECELIA: (Quickly) Take him down-stairs.

ALEC: Oh, he _is_ down-stairs.

MRS. CONNAGE: Well, you can show him where his room is. Tell him

I’m sorry that I can’t meet him now.

ALEC: He’s heard a lot about you all. I wish you’d hurry.

Father’s telling him all about the war and he’s restless. He’s

sort of temperamental.

(This last suffices to draw CECELIA into the room.)

CECELIA: (Seating herself high upon lingerie) How do you

mean—temperamental? You used to say that about him in letters.

ALEC: Oh, he writes stuff.

CECELIA: Does he play the piano?

ALEC: Don’t think so.

CECELIA: (Speculatively) Drink?

ALEC: Yes—nothing queer about him.

CECELIA: Money?

ALEC: Good Lord—ask him, he used to have a lot, and he’s got some

income now.

(MRS. CONNAGE appears.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Alec, of course we’re glad to have any friend of

yours—

ALEC: You certainly ought to meet Amory.

MRS. CONNAGE: Of course, I want to. But I think it’s so childish

of you to leave a perfectly good home to go and live with two

other boys in some impossible apartment. I hope it isn’t in order

that you can all drink as much as you want. (She pauses.) He’ll

be a little neglected to-night. This is Rosalind’s week, you see.

When a girl comes out, she needs _all_ the attention.

ROSALIND: (Outside) Well, then, prove it by coming here and

hooking me.

(MRS. CONNAGE goes.)

ALEC: Rosalind hasn’t changed a bit.

CECELIA: (In a lower tone) She’s awfully spoiled.

ALEC: She’ll meet her match to-night.

CECELIA: Who—Mr. Amory Blaine?

(ALEC nods.)

CECELIA: Well, Rosalind has still to meet the man she can’t

outdistance. Honestly, Alec, she treats men terribly. She abuses

them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their

faces—and they come back for more.

ALEC: They love it.

CECELIA: They hate it. She’s a—she’s a sort of vampire, I

think—and she can make girls do what she wants usually—only she

hates girls.

ALEC: Personality runs in our family.

CECELIA: (Resignedly) I guess it ran out before it got to me.

ALEC: Does Rosalind behave herself?

CECELIA: Not particularly well. Oh, she’s average—smokes

sometimes, drinks punch, frequently kissed—Oh, yes—common

knowledge—one of the effects of the war, you know.

(Emerges MRS. CONNAGE.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Rosalind’s almost finished so I can go down and

meet your friend.

(ALEC and his mother go out.)

ROSALIND: (Outside) Oh, mother—

CECELIA: Mother’s gone down.

(And now ROSALIND enters. ROSALIND is—utterly ROSALIND. She is

one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to

have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull

men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are

usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural

prerogative.

If ROSALIND could be spoiled the process would have been complete

by this time, and as a matter of fact, her disposition is not all

it should be; she wants what she wants when she wants it and she

is prone to make every one around her pretty miserable when she

doesn’t get it—but in the true sense she is not spoiled. Her

fresh enthusiasm, her will to grow and learn, her endless faith

in the inexhaustibility of romance, her courage and fundamental

honesty—these things are not spoiled.

There are long periods when she cordially loathes her whole

family. She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem

for herself and laissez faire for others. She loves shocking

stories: she has that coarse streak that usually goes with

natures that are both fine and big. She wants people to like her,

but if they do not it never worries her or changes her. She is by

no means a model character.

The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men.

ROSALIND had been disappointed in man after man as individuals,

but she had great faith in man as a sex. Women she detested. They

represented qualities that she felt and despised in

herself—incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty

dishonesty. She once told a roomful of her mother’s friends that

the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing

element among men. She danced exceptionally well, drew cleverly

but hastily, and had a startling facility with words, which she

used only in love-letters.

But all criticism of ROSALIND ends in her beauty. There was that

shade of glorious yellow hair, the desire to imitate which

supports the dye industry. There was the eternal kissable mouth,

small, slightly sensual, and utterly disturbing. There were gray

eyes and an unimpeachable skin with two spots of vanishing color.

She was slender and athletic, without underdevelopment, and it

was a delight to watch her move about a room, walk along a

street, swing a golf club, or turn a “cartwheel.”

A last qualification—her vivid, instant personality escaped that

conscious, theatrical quality that AMORY had found in ISABELLE.

MONSIGNOR DARCY would have been quite up a tree whether to call

her a personality or a personage. She was perhaps the delicious,

inexpressible, once-in-a-century blend.

On the night of her debut she is, for all her strange, stray

wisdom, quite like a happy little girl. Her mother’s maid has

just done her hair, but she has decided impatiently that she can

do a better job herself. She is too nervous just now to stay in

one place. To that we owe her presence in this littered room. She

is going to speak. ISABELLE’S alto tones had been like a violin,

but if you could hear ROSALIND, you would say her voice was

musical as a waterfall.)

ROSALIND: Honestly, there are only two costumes in the world that

I really enjoy being in—(Combing her hair at the dressing-table.)

One’s a hoop skirt with pantaloons; the other’s a one-piece

bathing-suit. I’m quite charming in both of them.

CECELIA: Glad you’re coming out?

ROSALIND: Yes; aren’t you?

CECELIA: (Cynically) You’re glad so you can get married and live

on Long Island with the _fast younger married set_. You want life

to be a chain of flirtation with a man for every link.

ROSALIND: _Want_ it to be one! You mean I’ve _found_ it one.

CECELIA: Ha!

ROSALIND: Cecelia, darling, you don’t know what a trial it is to

be—like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to

keep men from winking at me. If I laugh hard from a front row in

the theatre, the comedian plays to me for the rest of the

evening. If I drop my voice, my eyes, my handkerchief at a dance,

my partner calls me up on the ’phone every day for a week.

CECELIA: It must be an awful strain.

ROSALIND: The unfortunate part is that the only men who interest

me at all are the totally ineligible ones. Now—if I were poor I’d

go on the stage.

CECELIA: Yes, you might as well get paid for the amount of acting

you do.

ROSALIND: Sometimes when I’ve felt particularly radiant I’ve

thought, why should this be wasted on one man?

CECELIA: Often when you’re particularly sulky, I’ve wondered why

it should all be wasted on just one family. (Getting up.) I think

I’ll go down and meet Mr. Amory Blaine. I like temperamental men.

ROSALIND: There aren’t any. Men don’t know how to be really angry

or really happy—and the ones that do, go to pieces.

CECELIA: Well, I’m glad I don’t have all your worries. I’m

engaged.

ROSALIND: (With a scornful smile) Engaged? Why, you little

lunatic! If mother heard you talking like that she’d send you off

to boarding-school, where you belong.

CECELIA: You won’t tell her, though, because I know things I

could tell—and you’re too selfish!

ROSALIND: (A little annoyed) Run along, little girl! Who are you

engaged to, the iceman? the man that keeps the candy-store?

CECELIA: Cheap wit—good-by, darling, I’ll see you later.

ROSALIND: Oh, be _sure_ and do that—you’re such a help.

(Exit CECELIA. ROSALIND finished her hair and rises, humming. She

goes up to the mirror and starts to dance in front of it on the

soft carpet. She watches not her feet, but her eyes—never

casually but always intently, even when she smiles. The door

suddenly opens and then slams behind AMORY, very cool and

handsome as usual. He melts into instant confusion.)

HE: Oh, I’m sorry. I thought—

SHE: (Smiling radiantly) Oh, you’re Amory Blaine, aren’t you?

HE: (Regarding her closely) And you’re Rosalind?

SHE: I’m going to call you Amory—oh, come in—it’s all

right—mother’ll be right in—(under her breath) unfortunately.

HE: (Gazing around) This is sort of a new wrinkle for me.

SHE: This is No Man’s Land.

HE: This is where you—you—(pause)

SHE: Yes—all those things. (She crosses to the bureau.) See,

here’s my rouge—eye pencils.

HE: I didn’t know you were that way.

SHE: What did you expect?

HE: I thought you’d be sort of—sort of—sexless, you know, swim

and play golf.

SHE: Oh, I do—but not in business hours.

HE: Business?

SHE: Six to two—strictly.

HE: I’d like to have some stock in the corporation.

SHE: Oh, it’s not a corporation—it’s just “Rosalind, Unlimited.”

Fifty-one shares, name, good-will, and everything goes at $25,000

a year.

HE: (Disapprovingly) Sort of a chilly proposition.

SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind—do you? When I meet a man that

doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be

different.

HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on

women.

SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know—in my mind.

HE: (Interested) Go on.

SHE: No, you—you go on—you’ve made me talk about myself. That’s

against the rules.

HE: Rules?

SHE: My own rules—but you—Oh, Amory, I hear you’re brilliant. The

family expects _so_ much of you.

HE: How encouraging!

SHE: Alec said you’d taught him to think. Did you? I didn’t

believe any one could.

HE: No. I’m really quite dull.

(He evidently doesn’t intend this to be taken seriously.)

SHE: Liar.

HE: I’m—I’m religious—I’m literary. I’ve—I’ve even written poems.

SHE: Vers libre—splendid! (She declaims.)

“The trees are green, The birds are singing in the trees, The girl

sips her poison The bird flies away the girl dies.”

HE: (Laughing) No, not that kind.

SHE: (Suddenly) I like you.

HE: Don’t.

SHE: Modest too—

HE: I’m afraid of you. I’m always afraid of a girl—until I’ve

kissed her.

SHE: (Emphatically) My dear boy, the war is over.

HE: So I’ll always be afraid of you.

SHE: (Rather sadly) I suppose you will.

(A slight hesitation on both their parts.)

HE: (After due consideration) Listen. This is a frightful thing

to ask.

SHE: (Knowing what’s coming) After five minutes.

HE: But will you—kiss me? Or are you afraid?

SHE: I’m never afraid—but your reasons are so poor.

HE: Rosalind, I really _want_ to kiss you.

SHE: So do I.

(They kiss—definitely and thoroughly.)

HE: (After a breathless second) Well, is your curiosity

satisfied?

SHE: Is yours?

HE: No, it’s only aroused.

(He looks it.)

SHE: (Dreamily) I’ve kissed dozens of men. I suppose I’ll kiss

dozens more.

HE: (Abstractedly) Yes, I suppose you could—like that.

SHE: Most people like the way I kiss.

HE: (Remembering himself) Good Lord, yes. Kiss me once more,

Rosalind.

SHE: No—my curiosity is generally satisfied at one.

HE: (Discouraged) Is that a rule?

SHE: I make rules to fit the cases.

HE: You and I are somewhat alike—except that I’m years older in

experience.

SHE: How old are you?

HE: Almost twenty-three. You?

SHE: Nineteen—just.

HE: I suppose you’re the product of a fashionable school.

SHE: No—I’m fairly raw material. I was expelled from Spence—I’ve

forgotten why.

HE: What’s your general trend?

SHE: Oh, I’m bright, quite selfish, emotional when aroused, fond

of admiration—

HE: (Suddenly) I don’t want to fall in love with you—

SHE: (Raising her eyebrows) Nobody asked you to.

HE: (Continuing coldly) But I probably will. I love your mouth.

SHE: Hush! Please don’t fall in love with my mouth—hair, eyes,

shoulders, slippers—but _not_ my mouth. Everybody falls in love

with my mouth.

HE: It’s quite beautiful.

SHE: It’s too small.

HE: No it isn’t—let’s see.

(He kisses her again with the same thoroughness.)

SHE: (Rather moved) Say something sweet.

HE: (Frightened) Lord help me.

SHE: (Drawing away) Well, don’t—if it’s so hard.

HE: Shall we pretend? So soon?

SHE: We haven’t the same standards of time as other people.

HE: Already it’s—other people.

SHE: Let’s pretend.

HE: No—I can’t—it’s sentiment.

SHE: You’re not sentimental?

HE: No, I’m romantic—a sentimental person thinks things will

last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.

Sentiment is emotional.

SHE: And you’re not? (With her eyes half-closed.) You probably

flatter yourself that that’s a superior attitude.

HE: Well—Rosalind, Rosalind, don’t argue—kiss me again.

SHE: (Quite chilly now) No—I have no desire to kiss you.

HE: (Openly taken aback) You wanted to kiss me a minute ago.

SHE: This is now.

HE: I’d better go.

SHE: I suppose so.

(He goes toward the door.)

SHE: Oh!

(He turns.)

SHE: (Laughing) Score—Home Team: One hundred—Opponents: Zero.

(He starts back.)

SHE: (Quickly) Rain—no game.

(He goes out.)

(She goes quietly to the chiffonier, takes out a cigarette-case

and hides it in the side drawer of a desk. Her mother enters,

note-book in hand.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Good—I’ve been wanting to speak to you alone before

we go down-stairs.

ROSALIND: Heavens! you frighten me!

MRS. CONNAGE: Rosalind, you’ve been a very expensive proposition.

ROSALIND: (Resignedly) Yes.

MRS. CONNAGE: And you know your father hasn’t what he once had.

ROSALIND: (Making a wry face) Oh, please don’t talk about money.

MRS. CONNAGE: You can’t do anything without it. This is our last

year in this house—and unless things change Cecelia won’t have

the advantages you’ve had.

ROSALIND: (Impatiently) Well—what is it?

MRS. CONNAGE: So I ask you to please mind me in several things

I’ve put down in my note-book. The first one is: don’t disappear

with young men. There may be a time when it’s valuable, but at

present I want you on the dance-floor where I can find you. There

are certain men I want to have you meet and I don’t like finding

you in some corner of the conservatory exchanging silliness with

any one—or listening to it.

ROSALIND: (Sarcastically) Yes, listening to it _is_ better.

MRS. CONNAGE: And don’t waste a lot of time with the college

set—little boys nineteen and twenty years old. I don’t mind a

prom or a football game, but staying away from advantageous

parties to eat in little cafes down-town with Tom, Dick, and

Harry—

ROSALIND: (Offering her code, which is, in its way, quite as high

as her mother’s) Mother, it’s done—you can’t run everything now

the way you did in the early nineties.

MRS. CONNAGE: (Paying no attention) There are several bachelor

friends of your father’s that I want you to meet

to-night—youngish men.

ROSALIND: (Nodding wisely) About forty-five?

MRS. CONNAGE: (Sharply) Why not?

ROSALIND: Oh, _quite_ all right—they know life and are so

adorably tired looking (shakes her head)—but they _will_ dance.

MRS. CONNAGE: I haven’t met Mr. Blaine—but I don’t think you’ll

care for him. He doesn’t sound like a money-maker.

ROSALIND: Mother, I never _think_ about money.

MRS. CONNAGE: You never keep it long enough to think about it.

ROSALIND: (Sighs) Yes, I suppose some day I’ll marry a ton of

it—out of sheer boredom.

MRS. CONNAGE: (Referring to note-book) I had a wire from

Hartford. Dawson Ryder is coming up. Now there’s a young man I

like, and he’s floating in money. It seems to me that since you

seem tired of Howard Gillespie you might give Mr. Ryder some

encouragement. This is the third time he’s been up in a month.

ROSALIND: How did you know I was tired of Howard Gillespie?

MRS. CONNAGE: The poor boy looks so miserable every time he

comes.

ROSALIND: That was one of those romantic, pre-battle affairs.

They’re all wrong.

MRS. CONNAGE: (Her say said) At any rate, make us proud of you

to-night.

ROSALIND: Don’t you think I’m beautiful?

MRS. CONNAGE: You know you are.

(From down-stairs is heard the moan of a violin being tuned, the

roll of a drum. MRS. CONNAGE turns quickly to her daughter.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Come!

ROSALIND: One minute!

(Her mother leaves. ROSALIND goes to the glass where she gazes at

herself with great satisfaction. She kisses her hand and touches

her mirrored mouth with it. Then she turns out the lights and

leaves the room. Silence for a moment. A few chords from the

piano, the discreet patter of faint drums, the rustle of new

silk, all blend on the staircase outside and drift in through the

partly opened door. Bundled figures pass in the lighted hall. The

laughter heard below becomes doubled and multiplied. Then some

one comes in, closes the door, and switches on the lights. It is

CECELIA. She goes to the chiffonier, looks in the drawers,

hesitates—then to the desk whence she takes the cigarette-case

and extracts one. She lights it and then, puffing and blowing,

walks toward the mirror.)

CECELIA: (In tremendously sophisticated accents) Oh, yes, coming

out is _such_ a farce nowadays, you know. One really plays around

so much before one is seventeen, that it’s positively anticlimax.

(Shaking hands with a visionary middle-aged nobleman.) Yes, your

grace—I b’lieve I’ve heard my sister speak of you. Have a

puff—they’re very good. They’re—they’re Coronas. You don’t smoke?

What a pity! The king doesn’t allow it, I suppose. Yes, I’ll

dance.

(So she dances around the room to a tune from down-stairs, her

arms outstretched to an imaginary partner, the cigarette waving

in her hand.)

SEVERAL HOURS LATER

The corner of a den down-stairs, filled by a very comfortable

leather lounge. A small light is on each side above, and in the

middle, over the couch hangs a painting of a very old, very

dignified gentleman, period 1860. Outside the music is heard in a

fox-trot.

ROSALIND is seated on the lounge and on her left is HOWARD

GILLESPIE, a vapid youth of about twenty-four. He is obviously

very unhappy, and she is quite bored.

GILLESPIE: (Feebly) What do you mean I’ve changed. I feel the

same toward you.

ROSALIND: But you don’t look the same to me.

GILLESPIE: Three weeks ago you used to say that you liked me

because I was so blasé, so indifferent—I still am.

ROSALIND: But not about me. I used to like you because you had

brown eyes and thin legs.

GILLESPIE: (Helplessly) They’re still thin and brown. You’re a

vampire, that’s all.

ROSALIND: The only thing I know about vamping is what’s on the

piano score. What confuses men is that I’m perfectly natural. I

used to think you were never jealous. Now you follow me with your

eyes wherever I go.

GILLESPIE: I love you.

ROSALIND: (Coldly) I know it.

GILLESPIE: And you haven’t kissed me for two weeks. I had an idea

that after a girl was kissed she was—was—won.

ROSALIND: Those days are over. I have to be won all over again

every time you see me.

GILLESPIE: Are you serious?

ROSALIND: About as usual. There used to be two kinds of kisses:

First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were

engaged. Now there’s a third kind, where the man is kissed and

deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he’d kissed a

girl, every one knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of

1919 brags the same every one knows it’s because he can’t kiss

her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man

nowadays.

GILLESPIE: Then why do you play with men?

ROSALIND: (Leaning forward confidentially) For that first moment,

when he’s interested. There is a moment—Oh, just before the first

kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.

GILLESPIE: And then?

ROSALIND: Then after that you make him talk about himself. Pretty

soon he thinks of nothing but being alone with you—he sulks, he

won’t fight, he doesn’t want to play—Victory!

(Enter DAWSON RYDER, twenty-six, handsome, wealthy, faithful to

his own, a bore perhaps, but steady and sure of success.)

RYDER: I believe this is my dance, Rosalind.

ROSALIND: Well, Dawson, so you recognize me. Now I know I haven’t

got too much paint on. Mr. Ryder, this is Mr. Gillespie.

(They shake hands and GILLESPIE leaves, tremendously downcast.)

RYDER: Your party is certainly a success.

ROSALIND: Is it—I haven’t seen it lately. I’m weary—Do you mind

sitting out a minute?

RYDER: Mind—I’m delighted. You know I loathe this “rushing" idea.

See a girl yesterday, to-day, to-morrow.

ROSALIND: Dawson!

RYDER: What?

ROSALIND: I wonder if you know you love me.

RYDER: (Startled) What—Oh—you know you’re remarkable!

ROSALIND: Because you know I’m an awful proposition. Any one who

marries me will have his hands full. I’m mean—mighty mean.

RYDER: Oh, I wouldn’t say that.

ROSALIND: Oh, yes, I am—especially to the people nearest to me.

(She rises.) Come, let’s go. I’ve changed my mind and I want to

dance. Mother is probably having a fit.

(Exeunt. Enter ALEC and CECELIA.)

CECELIA: Just my luck to get my own brother for an intermission.

ALEC: (Gloomily) I’ll go if you want me to.

CECELIA: Good heavens, no—with whom would I begin the next dance?

(Sighs.) There’s no color in a dance since the French officers

went back.

ALEC: (Thoughtfully) I don’t want Amory to fall in love with

Rosalind.

CECELIA: Why, I had an idea that that was just what you did want.

ALEC: I did, but since seeing these girls—I don’t know. I’m

awfully attached to Amory. He’s sensitive and I don’t want him to

break his heart over somebody who doesn’t care about him.

CECELIA: He’s very good looking.

ALEC: (Still thoughtfully) She won’t marry him, but a girl

doesn’t have to marry a man to break his heart.

CECELIA: What does it? I wish I knew the secret.

ALEC: Why, you cold-blooded little kitty. It’s lucky for some

that the Lord gave you a pug nose.

(Enter MRS. CONNAGE.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Where on earth is Rosalind?

ALEC: (Brilliantly) Of course you’ve come to the best people to

find out. She’d naturally be with us.

MRS. CONNAGE: Her father has marshalled eight bachelor

millionaires to meet her.

ALEC: You might form a squad and march through the halls.

MRS. CONNAGE: I’m perfectly serious—for all I know she may be at

the Cocoanut Grove with some football player on the night of her

debut. You look left and I’ll—

ALEC: (Flippantly) Hadn’t you better send the butler through the

cellar?

MRS. CONNAGE: (Perfectly serious) Oh, you don’t think she’d be

there?

CECELIA: He’s only joking, mother.

ALEC: Mother had a picture of her tapping a keg of beer with some

high hurdler.

MRS. CONNAGE: Let’s look right away.

(They go out. ROSALIND comes in with GILLESPIE.)

GILLESPIE: Rosalind—Once more I ask you. Don’t you care a blessed

thing about me?

(AMORY walks in briskly.)

AMORY: My dance.

ROSALIND: Mr. Gillespie, this is Mr. Blaine.

GILLESPIE: I’ve met Mr. Blaine. From Lake Geneva, aren’t you?

AMORY: Yes.

GILLESPIE: (Desperately) I’ve been there. It’s in the—the Middle

West, isn’t it?

AMORY: (Spicily) Approximately. But I always felt that I’d rather

be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.

GILLESPIE: What!

AMORY: Oh, no offense.

(GILLESPIE bows and leaves.)

ROSALIND: He’s too much _people_.

AMORY: I was in love with a _people_ once.

ROSALIND: So?

AMORY: Oh, yes—her name was Isabelle—nothing at all to her except

what I read into her.

ROSALIND: What happened?

AMORY: Finally I convinced her that she was smarter than I

was—then she threw me over. Said I was critical and impractical,

you know.

ROSALIND: What do you mean impractical?

AMORY: Oh—drive a car, but can’t change a tire.

ROSALIND: What are you going to do?

AMORY: Can’t say—run for President, write—

ROSALIND: Greenwich Village?

AMORY: Good heavens, no—I said write—not drink.

ROSALIND: I like business men. Clever men are usually so homely.

AMORY: I feel as if I’d known you for ages.

ROSALIND: Oh, are you going to commence the “pyramid” story?

AMORY: No—I was going to make it French. I was Louis XIV and you

were one of my—my—(Changing his tone.) Suppose—we fell in love.

ROSALIND: I’ve suggested pretending.

AMORY: If we did it would be very big.

ROSALIND: Why?

AMORY: Because selfish people are in a way terribly capable of

great loves.

ROSALIND: (Turning her lips up) Pretend.

(Very deliberately they kiss.)

AMORY: I can’t say sweet things. But you _are_ beautiful.

ROSALIND: Not that.

AMORY: What then?

ROSALIND: (Sadly) Oh, nothing—only I want sentiment, real

sentiment—and I never find it.

AMORY: I never find anything else in the world—and I loathe it.

ROSALIND: It’s so hard to find a male to gratify one’s artistic

taste.

(Some one has opened a door and the music of a waltz surges into

the room. ROSALIND rises.)

ROSALIND: Listen! they’re playing “Kiss Me Again.”

(He looks at her.)

AMORY: Well?

ROSALIND: Well?

AMORY: (Softly—the battle lost) I love you.

ROSALIND: I love you—now.

(They kiss.)

AMORY: Oh, God, what have I done?

ROSALIND: Nothing. Oh, don’t talk. Kiss me again.

AMORY: I don’t know why or how, but I love you—from the moment I

saw you.

ROSALIND: Me too—I—I—oh, to-night’s to-night.

(Her brother strolls in, starts and then in a loud voice says:

“Oh, excuse me,” and goes.)

ROSALIND: (Her lips scarcely stirring) Don’t let me go—I don’t

care who knows what I do.

AMORY: Say it!

ROSALIND: I love you—now. (They part.) Oh—I am very youthful,

thank God—and rather beautiful, thank God—and happy, thank God,

thank God—(She pauses and then, in an odd burst of prophecy,

adds) Poor Amory!

(He kisses her again.)

KISMET

Within two weeks Amory and Rosalind were deeply and passionately

in love. The critical qualities which had spoiled for each of

them a dozen romances were dulled by the great wave of emotion

that washed over them.

“It may be an insane love-affair,” she told her anxious mother,

“but it’s not inane.”

The wave swept Amory into an advertising agency early in March,

where he alternated between astonishing bursts of rather

exceptional work and wild dreams of becoming suddenly rich and

touring Italy with Rosalind.

They were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly

every evening—always in a sort of breathless hush, as if they

feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of

this paradise of rose and flame. But the spell became a trance,

seemed to increase from day to day; they began to talk of

marrying in July—in June. All life was transmitted into terms of

their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were

nullified—their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep;

their former love-affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely

regretted juvenalia.

For the second time in his life Amory had had a complete

bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.

A LITTLE INTERLUDE

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as

inevitably his—the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim

streets ... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading

harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of

life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night

of streets and singing—he moved in a half-dream through the crowd

as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager

feet from every corner.... How the unforgettable faces of dusk

would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures,

would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness

than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now

were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer

air.

The room was in darkness except for the faint glow of Tom’s

cigarette where he lounged by the open window. As the door shut

behind him, Amory stood a moment with his back against it.

“Hello, Benvenuto Blaine. How went the advertising business

to-day?”

Amory sprawled on a couch.

“I loathed it as usual!” The momentary vision of the bustling

agency was displaced quickly by another picture.

“My God! She’s wonderful!”

Tom sighed.

“I can’t tell you,” repeated Amory, “just how wonderful she is. I

don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.”

Another sigh came from the window—quite a resigned sigh.

“She’s life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.”

He felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid.

“Oh, _Golly_, Tom!”

BITTER SWEET

“Sit like we do,” she whispered.

He sat in the big chair and held out his arms so that she could

nestle inside them.

“I knew you’d come to-night,” she said softly, “like summer, just

when I needed you most... darling... darling...”

His lips moved lazily over her face.

“You _taste_ so good,” he sighed.

“How do you mean, lover?”

“Oh, just sweet, just sweet...” he held her closer.

“Amory,” she whispered, “when you’re ready for me I’ll marry

you.”

“We won’t have much at first.”

“Don’t!” she cried. “It hurts when you reproach yourself for what

you can’t give me. I’ve got your precious self—and that’s enough

for me.”

“Tell me...”

“You know, don’t you? Oh, you know.”

“Yes, but I want to hear you say it.”

“I love you, Amory, with all my heart.”

“Always, will you?”

“All my life—Oh, Amory—”

“What?”

“I want to belong to you. I want your people to be my people. I

want to have your babies.”

“But I haven’t any people.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Amory. Just kiss me.”

“I’ll do what you want,” he said.

“No, I’ll do what _you_ want. We’re _you_—not me. Oh, you’re so

much a part, so much all of me...”

He closed his eyes.

“I’m so happy that I’m frightened. Wouldn’t it be awful if this

was—was the high point?...”

She looked at him dreamily.

“Beauty and love pass, I know.... Oh, there’s sadness, too. I

suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the

scent of roses and then the death of roses—”

“Beauty means the agony of sacrifice and the end of agony....”

“And, Amory, we’re beautiful, I know. I’m sure God loves us—”

“He loves you. You’re his most precious possession.”

“I’m not his, I’m yours. Amory, I belong to you. For the first

time I regret all the other kisses; now I know how much a kiss

can mean.”

Then they would smoke and he would tell her about his day at the

office—and where they might live. Sometimes, when he was

particularly loquacious, she went to sleep in his arms, but he

loved that Rosalind—all Rosalinds—as he had never in the world

loved any one else. Intangibly fleeting, unrememberable hours.

AQUATIC INCIDENT

One day Amory and Howard Gillespie meeting by accident down-town

took lunch together, and Amory heard a story that delighted him.

Gillespie after several cocktails was in a talkative mood; he

began by telling Amory that he was sure Rosalind was slightly

eccentric.

He had gone with her on a swimming party up in Westchester

County, and some one mentioned that Annette Kellerman had been

there one day on a visit and had dived from the top of a rickety,

thirty-foot summer-house. Immediately Rosalind insisted that

Howard should climb up with her to see what it looked like.

A minute later, as he sat and dangled his feet on the edge, a

form shot by him; Rosalind, her arms spread in a beautiful swan

dive, had sailed through the air into the clear water.

“Of course _I_ had to go, after that—and I nearly killed myself.

I thought I was pretty good to even try it. Nobody else in the

party tried it. Well, afterward Rosalind had the nerve to ask me

why I stooped over when I dove. ‘It didn’t make it any easier,’

she said, ‘it just took all the courage out of it.’ I ask you,

what can a man do with a girl like that? Unnecessary, I call it.”

Gillespie failed to understand why Amory was smiling delightedly

all through lunch. He thought perhaps he was one of these hollow

optimists.

FIVE WEEKS LATER

Again the library of the Connage house. ROSALIND is alone,

sitting on the lounge staring very moodily and unhappily at

nothing. She has changed perceptibly—she is a trifle thinner for

one thing; the light in her eyes is not so bright; she looks

easily a year older.

Her mother comes in, muffled in an opera-cloak. She takes in

ROSALIND with a nervous glance.

MRS. CONNAGE: Who is coming to-night?

(ROSALIND fails to hear her, at least takes no notice.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Alec is coming up to take me to this Barrie play,

“Et tu, Brutus.” (She perceives that she is talking to herself.)

Rosalind! I asked you who is coming to-night?

ROSALIND: (Starting) Oh—what—oh—Amory—

MRS. CONNAGE: (Sarcastically) You have so _many_ admirers lately

that I couldn’t imagine _which_ one. (ROSALIND doesn’t answer.)

Dawson Ryder is more patient than I thought he’d be. You haven’t

given him an evening this week.

ROSALIND: (With a very weary expression that is quite new to her

face.) Mother—please—

MRS. CONNAGE: Oh, _I_ won’t interfere. You’ve already wasted over

two months on a theoretical genius who hasn’t a penny to his

name, but _go_ ahead, waste your life on him. _I_ won’t

interfere.

ROSALIND: (As if repeating a tiresome lesson) You know he has a

little income—and you know he’s earning thirty-five dollars a

week in advertising—

MRS. CONNAGE: And it wouldn’t buy your clothes. (She pauses but

ROSALIND makes no reply.) I have your best interests at heart

when I tell you not to take a step you’ll spend your days

regretting. It’s not as if your father could help you. Things

have been hard for him lately and he’s an old man. You’d be

dependent absolutely on a dreamer, a nice, well-born boy, but a

dreamer—merely _clever_. (She implies that this quality in itself

is rather vicious.)

ROSALIND: For heaven’s sake, mother—

(A maid appears, announces Mr. Blaine who follows immediately.

AMORY’S friends have been telling him for ten days that he “looks

like the wrath of God,” and he does. As a matter of fact he has

not been able to eat a mouthful in the last thirty-six hours.)

AMORY: Good evening, Mrs. Connage.

MRS. CONNAGE: (Not unkindly) Good evening, Amory.

(AMORY and ROSALIND exchange glances—and ALEC comes in. ALEC’S

attitude throughout has been neutral. He believes in his heart

that the marriage would make AMORY mediocre and ROSALIND

miserable, but he feels a great sympathy for both of them.)

ALEC: Hi, Amory!

AMORY: Hi, Alec! Tom said he’d meet you at the theatre.

ALEC: Yeah, just saw him. How’s the advertising to-day? Write

some brilliant copy?

AMORY: Oh, it’s about the same. I got a raise—(Every one looks at

him rather eagerly)—of two dollars a week. (General collapse.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Come, Alec, I hear the car.

(A good night, rather chilly in sections. After MRS. CONNAGE and

ALEC go out there is a pause. ROSALIND still stares moodily at

the fireplace. AMORY goes to her and puts his arm around her.)

AMORY: Darling girl.

(They kiss. Another pause and then she seizes his hand, covers it

with kisses and holds it to her breast.)

ROSALIND: (Sadly) I love your hands, more than anything. I see

them often when you’re away from me—so tired; I know every line

of them. Dear hands!

(Their eyes meet for a second and then she begins to cry—a

tearless sobbing.)

AMORY: Rosalind!

ROSALIND: Oh, we’re so darned pitiful!

AMORY: Rosalind!

ROSALIND: Oh, I want to die!

AMORY: Rosalind, another night of this and I’ll go to pieces.

You’ve been this way four days now. You’ve got to be more

encouraging or I can’t work or eat or sleep. (He looks around

helplessly as if searching for new words to clothe an old,

shopworn phrase.) We’ll have to make a start. I like having to

make a start together. (His forced hopefulness fades as he sees

her unresponsive.) What’s the matter? (He gets up suddenly and

starts to pace the floor.) It’s Dawson Ryder, that’s what it is.

He’s been working on your nerves. You’ve been with him every

afternoon for a week. People come and tell me they’ve seen you

together, and I have to smile and nod and pretend it hasn’t the

slightest significance for me. And you won’t tell me anything as

it develops.

ROSALIND: Amory, if you don’t sit down I’ll scream.

AMORY: (Sitting down suddenly beside her) Oh, Lord.

ROSALIND: (Taking his hand gently) You know I love you, don’t

you?

AMORY: Yes.

ROSALIND: You know I’ll always love you—

AMORY: Don’t talk that way; you frighten me. It sounds as if we

weren’t going to have each other. (She cries a little and rising

from the couch goes to the armchair.) I’ve felt all afternoon

that things were worse. I nearly went wild down at the

office—couldn’t write a line. Tell me everything.

ROSALIND: There’s nothing to tell, I say. I’m just nervous.

AMORY: Rosalind, you’re playing with the idea of marrying Dawson

Ryder.

ROSALIND: (After a pause) He’s been asking me to all day.

AMORY: Well, he’s got his nerve!

ROSALIND: (After another pause) I like him.

AMORY: Don’t say that. It hurts me.

ROSALIND: Don’t be a silly idiot. You know you’re the only man

I’ve ever loved, ever will love.

AMORY: (Quickly) Rosalind, let’s get married—next week.

ROSALIND: We can’t.

AMORY: Why not?

ROSALIND: Oh, we can’t. I’d be your squaw—in some horrible place.

AMORY: We’ll have two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month

all told.

ROSALIND: Darling, I don’t even do my own hair, usually.

AMORY: I’ll do it for you.

ROSALIND: (Between a laugh and a sob) Thanks.

AMORY: Rosalind, you _can’t_ be thinking of marrying some one

else. Tell me! You leave me in the dark. I can help you fight it

out if you’ll only tell me.

ROSALIND: It’s just—us. We’re pitiful, that’s all. The very

qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a

failure.

AMORY: (Grimly) Go on.

ROSALIND: Oh—it _is_ Dawson Ryder. He’s so reliable, I almost

feel that he’d be a—a background.

AMORY: You don’t love him.

ROSALIND: I know, but I respect him, and he’s a good man and a

strong one.

AMORY: (Grudgingly) Yes—he’s that.

ROSALIND: Well—here’s one little thing. There was a little poor

boy we met in Rye Tuesday afternoon—and, oh, Dawson took him on

his lap and talked to him and promised him an Indian suit—and

next day he remembered and bought it—and, oh, it was so sweet and

I couldn’t help thinking he’d be so nice to—to our children—take

care of them—and I wouldn’t have to worry.

AMORY: (In despair) Rosalind! Rosalind!

ROSALIND: (With a faint roguishness) Don’t look so consciously

suffering.

AMORY: What power we have of hurting each other!

ROSALIND: (Commencing to sob again) It’s been so perfect—you and

I. So like a dream that I’d longed for and never thought I’d

find. The first real unselfishness I’ve ever felt in my life. And

I can’t see it fade out in a colorless atmosphere!

AMORY: It won’t—it won’t!

ROSALIND: I’d rather keep it as a beautiful memory—tucked away in

my heart.

AMORY: Yes, women can do that—but not men. I’d remember always,

not the beauty of it while it lasted, but just the bitterness,

the long bitterness.

ROSALIND: Don’t!

AMORY: All the years never to see you, never to kiss you, just a

gate shut and barred—you don’t dare be my wife.

ROSALIND: No—no—I’m taking the hardest course, the strongest

course. Marrying you would be a failure and I never fail—if you

don’t stop walking up and down I’ll scream!

(Again he sinks despairingly onto the lounge.)

AMORY: Come over here and kiss me.

ROSALIND: No.

AMORY: Don’t you _want_ to kiss me?

ROSALIND: To-night I want you to love me calmly and coolly.

AMORY: The beginning of the end.

ROSALIND: (With a burst of insight) Amory, you’re young. I’m

young. People excuse us now for our poses and vanities, for

treating people like Sancho and yet getting away with it. They

excuse us now. But you’ve got a lot of knocks coming to you—

AMORY: And you’re afraid to take them with me.

ROSALIND: No, not that. There was a poem I read somewhere—you’ll

say Ella Wheeler Wilcox and laugh—but listen:

“For this is wisdom—to love and live, To take what fate or the gods

may give, To ask no question, to make no prayer, To kiss the lips

and caress the hair, Speed passion’s ebb as we greet its flow, To

have and to hold, and, in time—let go.”

AMORY: But we haven’t had.

ROSALIND: Amory, I’m yours—you know it. There have been times in

the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so.

But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives.

AMORY: We’ve got to take our chance for happiness.

ROSALIND: Dawson says I’d learn to love him.

(AMORY with his head sunk in his hands does not move. The life

seems suddenly gone out of him.)

ROSALIND: Lover! Lover! I can’t do with you, and I can’t imagine

life without you.

AMORY: Rosalind, we’re on each other’s nerves. It’s just that

we’re both high-strung, and this week—

(His voice is curiously old. She crosses to him and taking his

face in her hands, kisses him.)

ROSALIND: I can’t, Amory. I can’t be shut away from the trees and

flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You’d hate

me in a narrow atmosphere. I’d make you hate me.

(Again she is blinded by sudden uncontrolled tears.)

AMORY: Rosalind—

ROSALIND: Oh, darling, go—Don’t make it harder! I can’t stand it—

AMORY: (His face drawn, his voice strained) Do you know what

you’re saying? Do you mean forever?

(There is a difference somehow in the quality of their

suffering.)

ROSALIND: Can’t you see—

AMORY: I’m afraid I can’t if you love me. You’re afraid of taking

two years’ knocks with me.

ROSALIND: I wouldn’t be the Rosalind you love.

AMORY: (A little hysterically) I can’t give you up! I can’t,

that’s all! I’ve got to have you!

ROSALIND: (A hard note in her voice) You’re being a baby now.

AMORY: (Wildly) I don’t care! You’re spoiling our lives!

ROSALIND: I’m doing the wise thing, the only thing.

AMORY: Are you going to marry Dawson Ryder?

ROSALIND: Oh, don’t ask me. You know I’m old in some ways—in

others—well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty

things and cheerfulness—and I dread responsibility. I don’t want

to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry

whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the

summer.

AMORY: And you love me.

ROSALIND: That’s just why it has to end. Drifting hurts too much.

We can’t have any more scenes like this.

(She draws his ring from her finger and hands it to him. Their

eyes blind again with tears.)

AMORY: (His lips against her wet cheek) Don’t! Keep it,

please—oh, don’t break my heart!

(She presses the ring softly into his hand.)

ROSALIND: (Brokenly) You’d better go.

AMORY: Good-by—

(She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, infinite

sadness.)

ROSALIND: Don’t ever forget me, Amory—

AMORY: Good-by—

(He goes to the door, fumbles for the knob, finds it—she sees him

throw back his head—and he is gone. Gone—she half starts from the

lounge and then sinks forward on her face into the pillows.)

ROSALIND: Oh, God, I want to die! (After a moment she rises and

with her eyes closed feels her way to the door. Then she turns

and looks once more at the room. Here they had sat and dreamed:

that tray she had so often filled with matches for him; that

shade that they had discreetly lowered one long Sunday afternoon.

Misty-eyed she stands and remembers; she speaks aloud.) Oh,

Amory, what have I done to you?

(And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time,

Rosalind feels that she has lost something, she knows not what,

she knows not why.)