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The Project Gutenberg EBook of This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Title: This Side of Paradise

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Release Date: August 6, 2008 [EBook #805]
Last Updated: February 15, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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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.)




      CHAPTER 2. Experiments in Convalescence


      The Knickerbocker Bar, beamed upon by Maxfield Parrish’s jovial,
      colorful “Old King Cole,” was well crowded. Amory stopped in the
      entrance and looked at his wrist-watch; he wanted particularly to
      know the time, for something in his mind that catalogued and
      classified liked to chip things off cleanly. Later it would
      satisfy him in a vague way to be able to think “that thing ended
      at exactly twenty minutes after eight on Thursday, June 10,
      1919.” This was allowing for the walk from her house—a walk
      concerning which he had afterward not the faintest recollection.

      He was in rather grotesque condition: two days of worry and
      nervousness, of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating
      in the emotional crisis and Rosalind’s abrupt decision—the strain
      of it had drugged the foreground of his mind into a merciful
      coma. As he fumbled clumsily with the olives at the free-lunch
      table, a man approached and spoke to him, and the olives dropped
      from his nervous hands.

      “Well, Amory...”

      It was some one he had known at Princeton; he had no idea of the
      name.

      “Hello, old boy—” he heard himself saying.

      “Name’s Jim Wilson—you’ve forgotten.”

      “Sure, you bet, Jim. I remember.”

      “Going to reunion?”

      “You know!” Simultaneously he realized that he was not going to
      reunion.

      “Get overseas?”

      Amory nodded, his eyes staring oddly. Stepping back to let some
      one pass, he knocked the dish of olives to a crash on the floor.

      “Too bad,” he muttered. “Have a drink?”

      Wilson, ponderously diplomatic, reached over and slapped him on
      the back.

      “You’ve had plenty, old boy.”

      Amory eyed him dumbly until Wilson grew embarrassed under the
      scrutiny.

      “Plenty, hell!” said Amory finally. “I haven’t had a drink
      to-day.”

      Wilson looked incredulous.

      “Have a drink or not?” cried Amory rudely.

      Together they sought the bar.

      “Rye high.”

      “I’ll just take a Bronx.”

      Wilson had another; Amory had several more. They decided to sit
      down. At ten o’clock Wilson was displaced by Carling, class of
      ’15. Amory, his head spinning gorgeously, layer upon layer of
      soft satisfaction setting over the bruised spots of his spirit,
      was discoursing volubly on the war.

      “’S a mental was’e,” he insisted with owl-like wisdom. “Two years
      my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal
      anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be
      Prussian ’bout ev’thing, women ’specially. Use’ be straight ’bout
      women college. Now don’givadam.” He expressed his lack of
      principle by sweeping a seltzer bottle with a broad gesture to
      noisy extinction on the floor, but this did not interrupt his
      speech. “Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ’At’s
      philos’phy for me now on.”

      Carling yawned, but Amory, waxing brilliant, continued:

      “Use’ wonder ’bout things—people satisfied compromise,
      fif’y-fif’y att’tude on life. Now don’ wonder, don’ wonder—” He
      became so emphatic in impressing on Carling the fact that he
      didn’t wonder that he lost the thread of his discourse and
      concluded by announcing to the bar at large that he was a
      “physcal anmal.”

      “What are you celebrating, Amory?”

      Amory leaned forward confidentially.

      “Cel’brating blowmylife. Great moment blow my life. Can’t tell
      you ’bout it—”

      He heard Carling addressing a remark to the bartender:

      “Give him a bromo-seltzer.”

      Amory shook his head indignantly.

      “None that stuff!”

      “But listen, Amory, you’re making yourself sick. You’re white as
      a ghost.”

      Amory considered the question. He tried to look at himself in the
      mirror but even by squinting up one eye could only see as far as
      the row of bottles behind the bar.

      “Like som’n solid. We go get some—some salad.”

      He settled his coat with an attempt at nonchalance, but letting
      go of the bar was too much for him, and he slumped against a
      chair.

      “We’ll go over to Shanley’s,” suggested Carling, offering an
      elbow.

      With this assistance Amory managed to get his legs in motion
      enough to propel him across Forty-second Street.

      Shanley’s was very dim. He was conscious that he was talking in a
      loud voice, very succinctly and convincingly, he thought, about a
      desire to crush people under his heel. He consumed three club
      sandwiches, devouring each as though it were no larger than a
      chocolate-drop. Then Rosalind began popping into his mind again,
      and he found his lips forming her name over and over. Next he was
      sleepy, and he had a hazy, listless sense of people in dress
      suits, probably waiters, gathering around the table....

      ... He was in a room and Carling was saying something about a
      knot in his shoe-lace.

      “Nemmine,” he managed to articulate drowsily. “Sleep in ’em....”


      STILL ALCOHOLIC

      He awoke laughing and his eyes lazily roamed his surroundings,
      evidently a bedroom and bath in a good hotel. His head was
      whirring and picture after picture was forming and blurring and
      melting before his eyes, but beyond the desire to laugh he had no
      entirely conscious reaction. He reached for the ’phone beside his
      bed.

      “Hello—what hotel is this—?

      “Knickerbocker? All right, send up two rye high-balls—”

      He lay for a moment and wondered idly whether they’d send up a
      bottle or just two of those little glass containers. Then, with
      an effort, he struggled out of bed and ambled into the bathroom.

      When he emerged, rubbing himself lazily with a towel, he found
      the bar boy with the drinks and had a sudden desire to kid him.
      On reflection he decided that this would be undignified, so he
      waved him away.

      As the new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and warmed him, the
      isolated pictures began slowly to form a cinema reel of the day
      before. Again he saw Rosalind curled weeping among the pillows,
      again he felt her tears against his cheek. Her words began
      ringing in his ears: “Don’t ever forget me, Amory—don’t ever
      forget me—”

      “Hell!” he faltered aloud, and then he choked and collapsed on
      the bed in a shaken spasm of grief. After a minute he opened his
      eyes and regarded the ceiling.

      “Damned fool!” he exclaimed in disgust, and with a voluminous
      sigh rose and approached the bottle. After another glass he gave
      way loosely to the luxury of tears. Purposely he called up into
      his mind little incidents of the vanished spring, phrased to
      himself emotions that would make him react even more strongly to
      sorrow.

      “We were so happy,” he intoned dramatically, “so very happy.”
      Then he gave way again and knelt beside the bed, his head
      half-buried in the pillow.

      “My own girl—my own—Oh—”

      He clinched his teeth so that the tears streamed in a flood from
      his eyes.

      “Oh... my baby girl, all I had, all I wanted!... Oh, my girl,
      come back, come back! I need you... need you... we’re so pitiful
      ... just misery we brought each other.... She’ll be shut away
      from me.... I can’t see her; I can’t be her friend. It’s got to
      be that way—it’s got to be—”

      And then again:

      “We’ve been so happy, so very happy....”

      He rose to his feet and threw himself on the bed in an ecstasy of
      sentiment, and then lay exhausted while he realized slowly that
      he had been very drunk the night before, and that his head was
      spinning again wildly. He laughed, rose, and crossed again to
      Lethe....

      At noon he ran into a crowd in the Biltmore bar, and the riot
      began again. He had a vague recollection afterward of discussing
      French poetry with a British officer who was introduced to him as
      “Captain Corn, of his Majesty’s Foot,” and he remembered
      attempting to recite “Clair de Lune” at luncheon; then he slept
      in a big, soft chair until almost five o’clock when another crowd
      found and woke him; there followed an alcoholic dressing of
      several temperaments for the ordeal of dinner. They selected
      theatre tickets at Tyson’s for a play that had a four-drink
      programme—a play with two monotonous voices, with turbid, gloomy
      scenes, and lighting effects that were hard to follow when his
      eyes behaved so amazingly. He imagined afterward that it must
      have been “The Jest.”...

      ... Then the Cocoanut Grove, where Amory slept again on a little
      balcony outside. Out in Shanley’s, Yonkers, he became almost
      logical, and by a careful control of the number of high-balls he
      drank, grew quite lucid and garrulous. He found that the party
      consisted of five men, two of whom he knew slightly; he became
      righteous about paying his share of the expense and insisted in a
      loud voice on arranging everything then and there to the
      amusement of the tables around him....

      Some one mentioned that a famous cabaret star was at the next
      table, so Amory rose and, approaching gallantly, introduced
      himself... this involved him in an argument, first with her
      escort and then with the headwaiter—Amory’s attitude being a
      lofty and exaggerated courtesy... he consented, after being
      confronted with irrefutable logic, to being led back to his own
      table.

      “Decided to commit suicide,” he announced suddenly.

      “When? Next year?”

      “Now. To-morrow morning. Going to take a room at the Commodore,
      get into a hot bath and open a vein.”

      “He’s getting morbid!”

      “You need another rye, old boy!”

      “We’ll all talk it over to-morrow.”

      But Amory was not to be dissuaded, from argument at least.

      “Did you ever get that way?” he demanded confidentially
      fortaccio.

      “Sure!”

      “Often?”

      “My chronic state.”

      This provoked discussion. One man said that he got so depressed
      sometimes that he seriously considered it. Another agreed that
      there was nothing to live for. “Captain Corn,” who had somehow
      rejoined the party, said that in his opinion it was when one’s
      health was bad that one felt that way most. Amory’s suggestion
      was that they should each order a Bronx, mix broken glass in it,
      and drink it off. To his relief no one applauded the idea, so
      having finished his high-ball, he balanced his chin in his hand
      and his elbow on the table—a most delicate, scarcely noticeable
      sleeping position, he assured himself—and went into a deep
      stupor....

      He was awakened by a woman clinging to him, a pretty woman, with
      brown, disarranged hair and dark blue eyes.

      “Take me home!” she cried.

      “Hello!” said Amory, blinking.

      “I like you,” she announced tenderly.

      “I like you too.”

      He noticed that there was a noisy man in the background and that
      one of his party was arguing with him.

      “Fella I was with’s a damn fool,” confided the blue-eyed woman.
      “I hate him. I want to go home with you.”

      “You drunk?” queried Amory with intense wisdom.

      She nodded coyly.

      “Go home with him,” he advised gravely. “He brought you.”

      At this point the noisy man in the background broke away from his
      detainers and approached.

      “Say!” he said fiercely. “I brought this girl out here and you’re
      butting in!”

      Amory regarded him coldly, while the girl clung to him closer.

      “You let go that girl!” cried the noisy man.

      Amory tried to make his eyes threatening.

      “You go to hell!” he directed finally, and turned his attention
      to the girl.

      “Love first sight,” he suggested.

      “I love you,” she breathed and nestled close to him. She _did_
      have beautiful eyes.

      Some one leaned over and spoke in Amory’s ear.

      “That’s just Margaret Diamond. She’s drunk and this fellow here
      brought her. Better let her go.”

      “Let him take care of her, then!” shouted Amory furiously. “I’m
      no W. Y. C. A. worker, am I?—am I?”

      “Let her go!”

      “It’s _her_ hanging on, damn it! Let her hang!”

      The crowd around the table thickened. For an instant a brawl
      threatened, but a sleek waiter bent back Margaret Diamond’s
      fingers until she released her hold on Amory, whereupon she
      slapped the waiter furiously in the face and flung her arms about
      her raging original escort.

      “Oh, Lord!” cried Amory.

      “Let’s go!”

      “Come on, the taxis are getting scarce!”

      “Check, waiter.”

      “C’mon, Amory. Your romance is over.”

      Amory laughed.

      “You don’t know how true you spoke. No idea. ’At’s the whole
      trouble.”


      AMORY ON THE LABOR QUESTION

      Two mornings later he knocked at the president’s door at Bascome
      and Barlow’s advertising agency.

      “Come in!”

      Amory entered unsteadily.

      “’Morning, Mr. Barlow.”

      Mr. Barlow brought his glasses to the inspection and set his
      mouth slightly ajar that he might better listen.

      “Well, Mr. Blaine. We haven’t seen you for several days.”

      “No,” said Amory. “I’m quitting.”

      “Well—well—this is—”

      “I don’t like it here.”

      “I’m sorry. I thought our relations had been quite—ah—pleasant.
      You seemed to be a hard worker—a little inclined perhaps to write
      fancy copy—”

      “I just got tired of it,” interrupted Amory rudely. “It didn’t
      matter a damn to me whether Harebell’s flour was any better than
      any one else’s. In fact, I never ate any of it. So I got tired of
      telling people about it—oh, I know I’ve been drinking—”

      Mr. Barlow’s face steeled by several ingots of expression.

      “You asked for a position—”

      Amory waved him to silence.

      “And I think I was rottenly underpaid. Thirty-five dollars a
      week—less than a good carpenter.”

      “You had just started. You’d never worked before,” said Mr.
      Barlow coolly.

      “But it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I
      could write your darned stuff for you. Anyway, as far as length
      of service goes, you’ve got stenographers here you’ve paid
      fifteen a week for five years.”

      “I’m not going to argue with you, sir,” said Mr. Barlow rising.

      “Neither am I. I just wanted to tell you I’m quitting.”

      They stood for a moment looking at each other impassively and
      then Amory turned and left the office.


      A LITTLE LULL

      Four days after that he returned at last to the apartment. Tom
      was engaged on a book review for The New Democracy on the staff
      of which he was employed. They regarded each other for a moment
      in silence.

      “Well?”

      “Well?”

      “Good Lord, Amory, where’d you get the black eye—and the jaw?”

      Amory laughed.

      “That’s a mere nothing.”

      He peeled off his coat and bared his shoulders.

      “Look here!”

      Tom emitted a low whistle.

      “What hit you?”

      Amory laughed again.

      “Oh, a lot of people. I got beaten up. Fact.” He slowly replaced
      his shirt. “It was bound to come sooner or later and I wouldn’t
      have missed it for anything.”

      “Who was it?”

      “Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few
      stray pedestrians, I guess. It’s the strangest feeling. You ought
      to get beaten up just for the experience of it. You fall down
      after a while and everybody sort of slashes in at you before you
      hit the ground—then they kick you.”

      Tom lighted a cigarette.

      “I spent a day chasing you all over town, Amory. But you always
      kept a little ahead of me. I’d say you’ve been on some party.”

      Amory tumbled into a chair and asked for a cigarette.

      “You sober now?” asked Tom quizzically.

      “Pretty sober. Why?”

      “Well, Alec has left. His family had been after him to go home
      and live, so he—”

      A spasm of pain shook Amory.

      “Too bad.”

      “Yes, it is too bad. We’ll have to get some one else if we’re
      going to stay here. The rent’s going up.”

      “Sure. Get anybody. I’ll leave it to you, Tom.”

      Amory walked into his bedroom. The first thing that met his
      glance was a photograph of Rosalind that he had intended to have
      framed, propped up against a mirror on his dresser. He looked at
      it unmoved. After the vivid mental pictures of her that were his
      portion at present, the portrait was curiously unreal. He went
      back into the study.

      “Got a cardboard box?”

      “No,” answered Tom, puzzled. “Why should I have? Oh, yes—there
      may be one in Alec’s room.”

      Eventually Amory found what he was looking for and, returning to
      his dresser, opened a drawer full of letters, notes, part of a
      chain, two little handkerchiefs, and some snap-shots. As he
      transferred them carefully to the box his mind wandered to some
      place in a book where the hero, after preserving for a year a
      cake of his lost love’s soap, finally washed his hands with it.
      He laughed and began to hum “After you’ve gone” ... ceased
      abruptly...

      The string broke twice, and then he managed to secure it, dropped
      the package into the bottom of his trunk, and having slammed the
      lid returned to the study.

      “Going out?” Tom’s voice held an undertone of anxiety.

      “Uh-huh.”

      “Where?”

      “Couldn’t say, old keed.”

      “Let’s have dinner together.”

      “Sorry. I told Sukey Brett I’d eat with him.”

      “Oh.”

      “By-by.”

      Amory crossed the street and had a high-ball; then he walked to
      Washington Square and found a top seat on a bus. He disembarked
      at Forty-third Street and strolled to the Biltmore bar.

      “Hi, Amory!”

      “What’ll you have?”

      “Yo-ho! Waiter!”


      TEMPERATURE NORMAL

      The advent of prohibition with the “thirsty-first” put a sudden
      stop to the submerging of Amory’s sorrows, and when he awoke one
      morning to find that the old bar-to-bar days were over, he had
      neither remorse for the past three weeks nor regret that their
      repetition was impossible. He had taken the most violent, if the
      weakest, method to shield himself from the stabs of memory, and
      while it was not a course he would have prescribed for others, he
      found in the end that it had done its business: he was over the
      first flush of pain.

      Don’t misunderstand! Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never
      love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his
      youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had
      surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never
      given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a
      different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more
      typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a
      mood in him. Rosalind had drawn out what was more than passionate
      admiration; he had a deep, undying affection for Rosalind.

      But there had been, near the end, so much dramatic tragedy,
      culminating in the arabesque nightmare of his three weeks’ spree,
      that he was emotionally worn out. The people and surroundings
      that he remembered as being cool or delicately artificial, seemed
      to promise him a refuge. He wrote a cynical story which featured
      his father’s funeral and despatched it to a magazine, receiving
      in return a check for sixty dollars and a request for more of the
      same tone. This tickled his vanity, but inspired him to no
      further effort.

      He read enormously. He was puzzled and depressed by “A Portrait
      of the Artist as a Young Man”; intensely interested by “Joan and
      Peter” and “The Undying Fire,” and rather surprised by his
      discovery through a critic named Mencken of several excellent
      American novels: “Vandover and the Brute,” “The Damnation of
      Theron Ware,” and “Jennie Gerhardt.” Mackenzie, Chesterton,
      Galsworthy, Bennett, had sunk in his appreciation from sagacious,
      life-saturated geniuses to merely diverting contemporaries.
      Shaw’s aloof clarity and brilliant consistency and the gloriously
      intoxicated efforts of H. G. Wells to fit the key of romantic
      symmetry into the elusive lock of truth, alone won his rapt
      attention.

      He wanted to see Monsignor Darcy, to whom he had written when he
      landed, but he had not heard from him; besides he knew that a
      visit to Monsignor would entail the story of Rosalind, and the
      thought of repeating it turned him cold with horror.

      In his search for cool people he remembered Mrs. Lawrence, a very
      intelligent, very dignified lady, a convert to the church, and a
      great devotee of Monsignor’s.

      He called her on the ’phone one day. Yes, she remembered him
      perfectly; no, Monsignor wasn’t in town, was in Boston she
      thought; he’d promised to come to dinner when he returned.
      Couldn’t Amory take luncheon with her?

      “I thought I’d better catch up, Mrs. Lawrence,” he said rather
      ambiguously when he arrived.

      “Monsignor was here just last week,” said Mrs. Lawrence
      regretfully. “He was very anxious to see you, but he’d left your
      address at home.”

      “Did he think I’d plunged into Bolshevism?” asked Amory,
      interested.

      “Oh, he’s having a frightful time.”

      “Why?”

      “About the Irish Republic. He thinks it lacks dignity.”

      “So?”

      “He went to Boston when the Irish President arrived and he was
      greatly distressed because the receiving committee, when they
      rode in an automobile, _would_ put their arms around the
      President.”

      “I don’t blame him.”

      “Well, what impressed you more than anything while you were in
      the army? You look a great deal older.”

      “That’s from another, more disastrous battle,” he answered,
      smiling in spite of himself. “But the army—let me see—well, I
      discovered that physical courage depends to a great extent on the
      physical shape a man is in. I found that I was as brave as the
      next man—it used to worry me before.”

      “What else?”

      “Well, the idea that men can stand anything if they get used to
      it, and the fact that I got a high mark in the psychological
      examination.”

      Mrs. Lawrence laughed. Amory was finding it a great relief to be
      in this cool house on Riverside Drive, away from more condensed
      New York and the sense of people expelling great quantities of
      breath into a little space. Mrs. Lawrence reminded him vaguely of
      Beatrice, not in temperament, but in her perfect grace and
      dignity. The house, its furnishings, the manner in which dinner
      was served, were in immense contrast to what he had met in the
      great places on Long Island, where the servants were so obtrusive
      that they had positively to be bumped out of the way, or even in
      the houses of more conservative “Union Club” families. He
      wondered if this air of symmetrical restraint, this grace, which
      he felt was continental, was distilled through Mrs. Lawrence’s
      New England ancestry or acquired in long residence in Italy and
      Spain.

      Two glasses of sauterne at luncheon loosened his tongue, and he
      talked, with what he felt was something of his old charm, of
      religion and literature and the menacing phenomena of the social
      order. Mrs. Lawrence was ostensibly pleased with him, and her
      interest was especially in his mind; he wanted people to like his
      mind again—after a while it might be such a nice place in which
      to live.

      “Monsignor Darcy still thinks that you’re his reincarnation, that
      your faith will eventually clarify.”

      “Perhaps,” he assented. “I’m rather pagan at present. It’s just
      that religion doesn’t seem to have the slightest bearing on life
      at my age.”

      When he left her house he walked down Riverside Drive with a
      feeling of satisfaction. It was amusing to discuss again such
      subjects as this young poet, Stephen Vincent Benet, or the Irish
      Republic. Between the rancid accusations of Edward Carson and
      Justice Cohalan he had completely tired of the Irish question;
      yet there had been a time when his own Celtic traits were pillars
      of his personal philosophy.

      There seemed suddenly to be much left in life, if only this
      revival of old interests did not mean that he was backing away
      from it again—backing away from life itself.


      RESTLESSNESS

      “I’m tres old and tres bored, Tom,” said Amory one day,
      stretching himself at ease in the comfortable window-seat. He
      always felt most natural in a recumbent position.

      “You used to be entertaining before you started to write,” he
      continued. “Now you save any idea that you think would do to
      print.”

      Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normality. They had
      decided that with economy they could still afford the apartment,
      which Tom, with the domesticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond
      of. The old English hunting prints on the wall were Tom’s, and
      the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in
      college, and the great profusion of orphaned candlesticks and the
      carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a
      minute without acute spinal disorders—Tom claimed that this was
      because one was sitting in the lap of Montespan’s wraith—at any
      rate, it was Tom’s furniture that decided them to stay.

      They went out very little: to an occasional play, or to dinner at
      the Ritz or the Princeton Club. With prohibition the great
      rendezvous had received their death wounds; no longer could one
      wander to the Biltmore bar at twelve or five and find congenial
      spirits, and both Tom and Amory had outgrown the passion for
      dancing with mid-Western or New Jersey debbies at the
      Club-de-Vingt (surnamed the “Club de Gink”) or the Plaza Rose
      Room—besides even that required several cocktails “to come down
      to the intellectual level of the women present,” as Amory had
      once put it to a horrified matron.

      Amory had lately received several alarming letters from Mr.
      Barton—the Lake Geneva house was too large to be easily rented;
      the best rent obtainable at present would serve this year to
      little more than pay for the taxes and necessary improvements; in
      fact, the lawyer suggested that the whole property was simply a
      white elephant on Amory’s hands. Nevertheless, even though it
      might not yield a cent for the next three years, Amory decided
      with a vague sentimentality that for the present, at any rate, he
      would not sell the house.

      This particular day on which he announced his ennui to Tom had
      been quite typical. He had risen at noon, lunched with Mrs.
      Lawrence, and then ridden abstractedly homeward atop one of his
      beloved buses.

      “Why shouldn’t you be bored,” yawned Tom. “Isn’t that the
      conventional frame of mind for the young man of your age and
      condition?”

      “Yes,” said Amory speculatively, “but I’m more than bored; I am
      restless.”

      “Love and war did for you.”

      “Well,” Amory considered, “I’m not sure that the war itself had
      any great effect on either you or me—but it certainly ruined the
      old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our
      generation.”

      Tom looked up in surprise.

      “Yes it did,” insisted Amory. “I’m not sure it didn’t kill it out
      of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to
      dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious
      or political leader—and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo
      de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world.
      Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it
      can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an
      important finger—”

      “I don’t agree with you,” Tom interrupted. “There never were men
      placed in such egotistic positions since—oh, since the French
      Revolution.”

      Amory disagreed violently.

      “You’re mistaking this period when every nut is an individualist
      for a period of individualism. Wilson has only been powerful when
      he has represented; he’s had to compromise over and over again.
      Just as soon as Trotsky and Lenin take a definite, consistent
      stand they’ll become merely two-minute figures like Kerensky.
      Even Foch hasn’t half the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War
      used to be the most individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the
      popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor
      responsibility: Guynemer and Sergeant York. How could a schoolboy
      make a hero of Pershing? A big man has no time really to do
      anything but just sit and be big.”

      “Then you don’t think there will be any more permanent world
      heroes?”

      “Yes—in history—not in life. Carlyle would have difficulty
      getting material for a new chapter on ‘The Hero as a Big Man.’”

      “Go on. I’m a good listener to-day.”

      “People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard.
      But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier
      or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw,
      a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away.
      My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest
      path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over
      and over.”

      “Then you blame it on the press?”

      “Absolutely. Look at you; you’re on The New Democracy, considered
      the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do
      things and all that. What’s your business? Why, to be as clever,
      as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about
      every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned you to deal
      with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can
      throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the
      people buy the issue. You, Tom d’Invilliers, a blighted Shelley,
      changing, shifting, clever, unscrupulous, represent the critical
      consciousness of the race—Oh, don’t protest, I know the stuff. I
      used to write book reviews in college; I considered it rare sport
      to refer to the latest honest, conscientious effort to propound a
      theory or a remedy as a ‘welcome addition to our light summer
      reading.’ Come on now, admit it.”

      Tom laughed, and Amory continued triumphantly.

      “We _want_ to believe. Young students try to believe in older
      authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen,
      countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they _can’t_.
      Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered
      criticism. It’s worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich,
      unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping,
      acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a
      paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of
      tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern
      living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents
      the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year
      later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper’s
      ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a
      sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation,
      the reaction against them—”

      He paused only to get his breath.

      “And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my
      ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins
      on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into
      people’s heads; I might cause a poor, inoffensive capitalist to
      have a vulgar liaison with a bomb, or get some innocent little
      Bolshevik tangled up with a machine-gun bullet—”

      Tom was growing restless under this lampooning of his connection
      with The New Democracy.

      “What’s all this got to do with your being bored?”

      Amory considered that it had much to do with it.

      “How’ll I fit in?” he demanded. “What am I for? To propagate the
      race? According to the American novels we are led to believe that
      the ‘healthy American boy’ from nineteen to twenty-five is an
      entirely sexless animal. As a matter of fact, the healthier he is
      the less that’s true. The only alternative to letting it get you
      is some violent interest. Well, the war is over; I believe too
      much in the responsibilities of authorship to write just now; and
      business, well, business speaks for itself. It has no connection
      with anything in the world that I’ve ever been interested in,
      except a slim, utilitarian connection with economics. What I’d
      see of it, lost in a clerkship, for the next and best ten years
      of my life would have the intellectual content of an industrial
      movie.”

      “Try fiction,” suggested Tom.

      “Trouble is I get distracted when I start to write stories—get
      afraid I’m doing it instead of living—get thinking maybe life is
      waiting for me in the Japanese gardens at the Ritz or at Atlantic
      City or on the lower East Side.

      “Anyway,” he continued, “I haven’t the vital urge. I wanted to be
      a regular human being but the girl couldn’t see it that way.”

      “You’ll find another.”

      “God! Banish the thought. Why don’t you tell me that ‘if the girl
      had been worth having she’d have waited for you’? No, sir, the
      girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody. If I thought
      there’d be another I’d lose my remaining faith in human nature.
      Maybe I’ll play—but Rosalind was the only girl in the wide world
      that could have held me.”

      “Well,” yawned Tom, “I’ve played confidant a good hour by the
      clock. Still, I’m glad to see you’re beginning to have violent
      views again on something.”

      “I am,” agreed Amory reluctantly. “Yet when I see a happy family
      it makes me sick at my stomach—”

      “Happy families try to make people feel that way,” said Tom
      cynically.


      TOM THE CENSOR

      There were days when Amory listened. These were when Tom,
      wreathed in smoke, indulged in the slaughter of American
      literature. Words failed him.

      “Fifty thousand dollars a year,” he would cry. “My God! Look at
      them, look at them—Edna Ferber, Gouverneur Morris, Fanny Hurst,
      Mary Roberts Rinehart—not producing among ’em one story or novel
      that will last ten years. This man Cobb—I don’t tink he’s either
      clever or amusing—and what’s more, I don’t think very many people
      do, except the editors. He’s just groggy with advertising. And—oh
      Harold Bell Wright oh Zane Grey—”

      “They try.”

      “No, they don’t even try. Some of them _can_ write, but they
      won’t sit down and do one honest novel. Most of them _can’t_
      write, I’ll admit. I believe Rupert Hughes tries to give a real,
      comprehensive picture of American life, but his style and
      perspective are barbarous. Ernest Poole and Dorothy Canfield try
      but they’re hindered by their absolute lack of any sense of
      humor; but at least they crowd their work instead of spreading it
      thin. Every author ought to write every book as if he were going
      to be beheaded the day he finished it.”

      “Is that double entente?”

      “Don’t slow me up! Now there’s a few of ’em that seem to have
      some cultural background, some intelligence and a good deal of
      literary felicity but they just simply won’t write honestly;
      they’d all claim there was no public for good stuff. Then why the
      devil is it that Wells, Conrad, Galsworthy, Shaw, Bennett, and
      the rest depend on America for over half their sales?”

      “How does little Tommy like the poets?”

      Tom was overcome. He dropped his arms until they swung loosely
      beside the chair and emitted faint grunts.

      “I’m writing a satire on ’em now, calling it ‘Boston Bards and
      Hearst Reviewers.’”

      “Let’s hear it,” said Amory eagerly.

      “I’ve only got the last few lines done.”

      “That’s very modern. Let’s hear ’em, if they’re funny.”

      Tom produced a folded paper from his pocket and read aloud,
      pausing at intervals so that Amory could see that it was free
      verse:

   “So Walter Arensberg, Alfred Kreymborg, Carl Sandburg, Louis
   Untermeyer, Eunice Tietjens, Clara Shanafelt, James Oppenheim,
   Maxwell Bodenheim, Richard Glaenzer, Scharmel Iris, Conrad Aiken, I
   place your names here So that you may live If only as names,
   Sinuous, mauve-colored names, In the Juvenalia Of my collected
   editions.”

      Amory roared.

      “You win the iron pansy. I’ll buy you a meal on the arrogance of
      the last two lines.”

      Amory did not entirely agree with Tom’s sweeping damnation of
      American novelists and poets. He enjoyed both Vachel Lindsay and
      Booth Tarkington, and admired the conscientious, if slender,
      artistry of Edgar Lee Masters.

      “What I hate is this idiotic drivel about ‘I am God—I am man—I
      ride the winds—I look through the smoke—I am the life sense.’”

      “It’s ghastly!”

      “And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make
      business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it,
      unless it’s crooked business. If it was an entertaining subject
      they’d buy the life of James J. Hill and not one of these long
      office tragedies that harp along on the significance of smoke—”

      “And gloom,” said Tom. “That’s another favorite, though I’ll
      admit the Russians have the monopoly. Our specialty is stories
      about little girls who break their spines and get adopted by
      grouchy old men because they smile so much. You’d think we were a
      race of cheerful cripples and that the common end of the Russian
      peasant was suicide—”

      “Six o’clock,” said Amory, glancing at his wrist-watch. “I’ll buy
      you a grea’ big dinner on the strength of the Juvenalia of your
      collected editions.”


      LOOKING BACKWARD

      July sweltered out with a last hot week, and Amory in another
      surge of unrest realized that it was just five months since he
      and Rosalind had met. Yet it was already hard for him to
      visualize the heart-whole boy who had stepped off the transport,
      passionately desiring the adventure of life. One night while the
      heat, overpowering and enervating, poured into the windows of his
      room he struggled for several hours in a vague effort to
      immortalize the poignancy of that time.

  The February streets, wind-washed by night, blow full of strange
  half-intermittent damps, bearing on wasted walks in shining sight wet
  snow plashed into gleams under the lamps, like golden oil from some
  divine machine, in an hour of thaw and stars.
  Strange damps—full of the eyes of many men, crowded with life borne
  in upon a lull....  Oh, I was young, for I could turn again to you,
  most finite and most beautiful, and taste the stuff of
  half-remembered dreams, sweet and new on your mouth.
 ... There was a tanging in the midnight air—silence was dead and sound
 not yet awoken—Life cracked like ice!—one brilliant note and there,
 radiant and pale, you stood... and spring had broken. (The icicles
 were short upon the roofs and the changeling city swooned.)
  Our thoughts were frosty mist along the eaves; our two ghosts kissed,
  high on the long, mazed wires—eerie half-laughter echoes here and
  leaves only a fatuous sigh for young desires; regret has followed
  after things she loved, leaving the great husk.


      ANOTHER ENDING

      In mid-August came a letter from Monsignor Darcy, who had
      evidently just stumbled on his address:

      MY DEAR BOY:—

      Your last letter was quite enough to make me worry about you. It
      was not a bit like yourself. Reading between the lines I should
      imagine that your engagement to this girl is making you rather
      unhappy, and I see you have lost all the feeling of romance that
      you had before the war. You make a great mistake if you think you
      can be romantic without religion. Sometimes I think that with
      both of us the secret of success, when we find it, is the
      mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our
      personalities, and when it ebbs out our personalities shrink; I
      should call your last two letters rather shrivelled. Beware of
      losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or
      woman.

      His Eminence Cardinal O’Neill and the Bishop of Boston are
      staying with me at present, so it is hard for me to get a moment
      to write, but I wish you would come up here later if only for a
      week-end. I go to Washington this week.

      What I shall do in the future is hanging in the balance.
      Absolutely between ourselves I should not be surprised to see the
      red hat of a cardinal descend upon my unworthy head within the
      next eight months. In any event, I should like to have a house in
      New York or Washington where you could drop in for week-ends.

      Amory, I’m very glad we’re both alive; this war could easily have
      been the end of a brilliant family. But in regard to matrimony,
      you are now at the most dangerous period of your life. You might
      marry in haste and repent at leisure, but I think you won’t. From
      what you write me about the present calamitous state of your
      finances, what you want is naturally impossible. However, if I
      judge you by the means I usually choose, I should say that there
      will be something of an emotional crisis within the next year.

      Do write me. I feel annoyingly out of date on you.

          With greatest affection,
                              THAYER DARCY.

      Within a week after the receipt of this letter their little
      household fell precipitously to pieces. The immediate cause was
      the serious and probably chronic illness of Tom’s mother. So they
      stored the furniture, gave instructions to sublet and shook hands
      gloomily in the Pennsylvania Station. Amory and Tom seemed always
      to be saying good-by.

      Feeling very much alone, Amory yielded to an impulse and set off
      southward, intending to join Monsignor in Washington. They missed
      connections by two hours, and, deciding to spend a few days with
      an ancient, remembered uncle, Amory journeyed up through the
      luxuriant fields of Maryland into Ramilly County. But instead of
      two days his stay lasted from mid-August nearly through
      September, for in Maryland he met Eleanor.




      CHAPTER 3. Young Irony


      For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still
      to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills
      into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the
      slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost
      a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he
      lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was,
      say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask
      of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild
      fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.

      With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to
      the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they
      knew then that they could see the devil in each other. But
      Eleanor—did Amory dream her? Afterward their ghosts played, yet
      both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the
      infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of
      himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? She
      will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this
      she will say:

      “And Amory will have no other adventure like me.”

      Nor will she sigh, any more than he would sigh.

      Eleanor tried to put it on paper once:

   “The fading things we only know We’ll have forgotten... Put away...
   Desires that melted with the snow, And dreams begotten This to-day:
   The sudden dawns we laughed to greet, That all could see, that none
   could share, Will be but dawns... and if we meet We shall not care.
    Dear... not one tear will rise for this... A little while hence No
    regret Will stir for a remembered kiss— Not even silence, When
    we’ve met, Will give old ghosts a waste to roam, Or stir the
    surface of the sea... If gray shapes drift beneath the foam We
    shall not see.”

      They quarrelled dangerously because Amory maintained that _sea_
      and _see_ couldn’t possibly be used as a rhyme. And then Eleanor
      had part of another verse that she couldn’t find a beginning for:

   “... But wisdom passes... still the years Will feed us wisdom.... 
   Age will go Back to the old— For all our tears We shall not know.”

      Eleanor hated Maryland passionately. She belonged to the oldest
      of the old families of Ramilly County and lived in a big, gloomy
      house with her grandfather. She had been born and brought up in
      France.... I see I am starting wrong. Let me begin again.

      Amory was bored, as he usually was in the country. He used to go
      for far walks by himself—and wander along reciting “Ulalume” to
      the corn-fields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to
      death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency. One afternoon he
      had strolled for several miles along a road that was new to him,
      and then through a wood on bad advice from a colored woman...
      losing himself entirely. A passing storm decided to break out,
      and to his great impatience the sky grew black as pitch and the
      rain began to splatter down through the trees, become suddenly
      furtive and ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacing crashes up the
      valley and scattered through the woods in intermittent batteries.
      He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally,
      through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the
      trees where the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed
      to the edge of the woods and then hesitated whether or not to
      cross the fields and try to reach the shelter of the little house
      marked by a light far down the valley. It was only half past
      five, but he could see scarcely ten steps before him, except when
      the lightning made everything vivid and grotesque for great
      sweeps around.

      Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a
      low, husky voice, a girl’s voice, and whoever was singing was
      very close to him. A year before he might have laughed, or
      trembled; but in his restless mood he only stood and listened
      while the words sank into his consciousness:

   “Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne Blessent mon coeur
   D’une langueur Monotone.”

      The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a
      quaver. The girl was evidently in the field and the voice seemed
      to come vaguely from a haystack about twenty feet in front of
      him.

      Then it ceased: ceased and began again in a weird chant that
      soared and hung and fell and blended with the rain:

   “Tout suffocant Et bleme quand Sonne l’heure Je me souviens Des
   jours anciens Et je pleure....”

      “Who the devil is there in Ramilly County,” muttered Amory aloud,
      “who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a
      soaking haystack?”

      “Somebody’s there!” cried the voice unalarmed. “Who are
      you?—Manfred, St. Christopher, or Queen Victoria?”

      “I’m Don Juan!” Amory shouted on impulse, raising his voice above
      the noise of the rain and the wind.

      A delighted shriek came from the haystack.

      “I know who you are—you’re the blond boy that likes ‘Ulalume’—I
      recognize your voice.”

      “How do I get up?” he cried from the foot of the haystack,
      whither he had arrived, dripping wet. A head appeared over the
      edge—it was so dark that Amory could just make out a patch of
      damp hair and two eyes that gleamed like a cat’s.

      “Run back!” came the voice, “and jump and I’ll catch your
      hand—no, not there—on the other side.”

      He followed directions and as he sprawled up the side, knee-deep
      in hay, a small, white hand reached out, gripped his, and helped
      him onto the top.

      “Here you are, Juan,” cried she of the damp hair. “Do you mind if
      I drop the Don?”

      “You’ve got a thumb like mine!” he exclaimed.

      “And you’re holding my hand, which is dangerous without seeing my
      face.” He dropped it quickly.

      As if in answer to his prayers came a flash of lightning and he
      looked eagerly at her who stood beside him on the soggy haystack,
      ten feet above the ground. But she had covered her face and he
      saw nothing but a slender figure, dark, damp, bobbed hair, and
      the small white hands with the thumbs that bent back like his.

      “Sit down,” she suggested politely, as the dark closed in on
      them. “If you’ll sit opposite me in this hollow you can have half
      of the raincoat, which I was using as a water-proof tent until
      you so rudely interrupted me.”

      “I was asked,” Amory said joyfully; “you asked me—you know you
      did.”

      “Don Juan always manages that,” she said, laughing, “but I shan’t
      call you that any more, because you’ve got reddish hair. Instead
      you can recite ‘Ulalume’ and I’ll be Psyche, your soul.”

      Amory flushed, happily invisible under the curtain of wind and
      rain. They were sitting opposite each other in a slight hollow in
      the hay with the raincoat spread over most of them, and the rain
      doing for the rest. Amory was trying desperately to see Psyche,
      but the lightning refused to flash again, and he waited
      impatiently. Good Lord! supposing she wasn’t beautiful—supposing
      she was forty and pedantic—heavens! Suppose, only suppose, she
      was mad. But he knew the last was unworthy. Here had Providence
      sent a girl to amuse him just as it sent Benvenuto Cellini men to
      murder, and he was wondering if she was mad, just because she
      exactly filled his mood.

      “I’m not,” she said.

      “Not what?”

      “Not mad. I didn’t think you were mad when I first saw you, so it
      isn’t fair that you should think so of me.”

      “How on earth—”

      As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory could be “on a
      subject” and stop talking with the definite thought of it in
      their heads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that
      their minds had followed the same channels and led them each to a
      parallel idea, an idea that others would have found absolutely
      unconnected with the first.

      “Tell me,” he demanded, leaning forward eagerly, “how do you know
      about ‘Ulalume’—how did you know the color of my hair? What’s
      your name? What were you doing here? Tell me all at once!”

      Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of overreaching
      light and he saw Eleanor, and looked for the first time into
      those eyes of hers. Oh, she was magnificent—pale skin, the color
      of marble in starlight, slender brows, and eyes that glittered
      green as emeralds in the blinding glare. She was a witch, of
      perhaps nineteen, he judged, alert and dreamy and with the
      tell-tale white line over her upper lip that was a weakness and a
      delight. He sank back with a gasp against the wall of hay.

      “Now you’ve seen me,” she said calmly, “and I suppose you’re
      about to say that my green eyes are burning into your brain.”

      “What color is your hair?” he asked intently. “It’s bobbed, isn’t
      it?”

      “Yes, it’s bobbed. I don’t know what color it is,” she answered,
      musing, “so many men have asked me. It’s medium, I suppose—No one
      ever looks long at my hair. I’ve got beautiful eyes, though,
      haven’t I. I don’t care what you say, I have beautiful eyes.”

      “Answer my question, Madeline.”

      “Don’t remember them all—besides my name isn’t Madeline, it’s
      Eleanor.”

      “I might have guessed it. You _look_ like Eleanor—you have that
      Eleanor look. You know what I mean.”

      There was a silence as they listened to the rain.

      “It’s going down my neck, fellow lunatic,” she offered finally.

      “Answer my questions.”

      “Well—name of Savage, Eleanor; live in big old house mile down
      road; nearest living relation to be notified, grandfather—Ramilly
      Savage; height, five feet four inches; number on watch-case, 3077
      W; nose, delicate aquiline; temperament, uncanny—”

      “And me,” Amory interrupted, “where did you see me?”

      “Oh, you’re one of _those_ men,” she answered haughtily, “must
      lug old self into conversation. Well, my boy, I was behind a
      hedge sunning myself one day last week, and along comes a man
      saying in a pleasant, conceited way of talking:

    “‘And now when the night was senescent’ (says he) ‘And the star
    dials pointed to morn At the end of the path a liquescent’ (says
    he) ‘And nebulous lustre was born.’

      “So I poked my eyes up over the hedge, but you had started to
      run, for some unknown reason, and so I saw but the back of your
      beautiful head. ‘Oh!’ says I, ‘there’s a man for whom many of us
      might sigh,’ and I continued in my best Irish—”

      “All right,” Amory interrupted. “Now go back to yourself.”

      “Well, I will. I’m one of those people who go through the world
      giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those
      I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social
      courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven’t the
      patience to write books; and I never met a man I’d marry.
      However, I’m only eighteen.”

      The storm was dying down softly and only the wind kept up its
      ghostly surge and made the stack lean and gravely settle from
      side to side. Amory was in a trance. He felt that every moment
      was precious. He had never met a girl like this before—she would
      never seem quite the same again. He didn’t at all feel like a
      character in a play, the appropriate feeling in an unconventional
      situation—instead, he had a sense of coming home.

      “I have just made a great decision,” said Eleanor after another
      pause, “and that is why I’m here, to answer another of your
      questions. I have just decided that I don’t believe in
      immortality.”

      “Really! how banal!”

      “Frightfully so,” she answered, “but depressing with a stale,
      sickly depression, nevertheless. I came out here to get wet—like
      a wet hen; wet hens always have great clarity of mind,” she
      concluded.

      “Go on,” Amory said politely.

      “Well—I’m not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and
      rubber boots and came out. You see I was always afraid, before,
      to say I didn’t believe in God—because the lightning might strike
      me—but here I am and it hasn’t, of course, but the main point is
      that this time I wasn’t any more afraid of it than I had been
      when I was a Christian Scientist, like I was last year. So now I
      know I’m a materialist and I was fraternizing with the hay when
      you came out and stood by the woods, scared to death.”

      “Why, you little wretch—” cried Amory indignantly. “Scared of
      what?”

      “_Yourself!_” she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands
      and laughed. “See—see! Conscience—kill it like me! Eleanor
      Savage, materiologist—no jumping, no starting, come early—”

      “But I _have_ to have a soul,” he objected. “I can’t be
      rational—and I won’t be molecular.”

      She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leaving his own and
      whispered with a sort of romantic finality:

      “I thought so, Juan, I feared so—you’re sentimental. You’re not
      like me. I’m a romantic little materialist.”

      “I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you
      know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the
      romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”
      (This was an ancient distinction of Amory’s.)

      “Epigrams. I’m going home,” she said sadly. “Let’s get off the
      haystack and walk to the cross-roads.”

      They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him
      help her down and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump
      in the soft mud where she sat for an instant, laughing at
      herself. Then she jumped to her feet and slipped her hand into
      his, and they tiptoed across the fields, jumping and swinging
      from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendent delight seemed to
      sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen and the
      storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor’s arm
      touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he
      should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was
      painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his
      eyes as ever he did when he walked with her—she was a feast and a
      folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a
      haystack and see life through her green eyes. His paganism soared
      that night and when she faded out like a gray ghost down the
      road, a deep singing came out of the fields and filled his way
      homeward. All night the summer moths flitted in and out of
      Amory’s window; all night large looming sounds swayed in mystic
      revery through the silver grain—and he lay awake in the clear
      darkness.


      SEPTEMBER

      Amory selected a blade of grass and nibbled at it scientifically.

      “I never fall in love in August or September,” he proffered.

      “When then?”

      “Christmas or Easter. I’m a liturgist.”

      “Easter!” She turned up her nose. “Huh! Spring in corsets!”

      “Easter _would_ bore spring, wouldn’t she? Easter has her hair
      braided, wears a tailored suit.”

  “Bind on thy sandals, oh, thou most fleet. Over the splendor and
  speed of thy feet—”

      quoted Eleanor softly, and then added: “I suppose Hallowe’en is a
      better day for autumn than Thanksgiving.”

      “Much better—and Christmas eve does very well for winter, but
      summer...”

      “Summer has no day,” she said. “We can’t possibly have a summer
      love. So many people have tried that the name’s become
      proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a
      charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.
      It’s a sad season of life without growth.... It has no day.”

      “Fourth of July,” Amory suggested facetiously.

      “Don’t be funny!” she said, raking him with her eyes.

      “Well, what could fulfil the promise of spring?”

      She thought a moment.

      “Oh, I suppose heaven would, if there was one,” she said finally,
      “a sort of pagan heaven—you ought to be a materialist,” she
      continued irrelevantly.

      “Why?”

      “Because you look a good deal like the pictures of Rupert
      Brooke.”

      To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he
      knew Eleanor. What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her,
      toward himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman’s
      literary moods. Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing
      with her short hair, her voice husky as she ran up and down the
      scale from Grantchester to Waikiki. There was something most
      passionate in Eleanor’s reading aloud. They seemed nearer, not
      only mentally, but physically, when they read, than when she was
      in his arms, and this was often, for they fell half into love
      almost from the first. Yet was Amory capable of love now? He
      could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour, but
      even while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew that
      neither of them could care as he had cared once before—I suppose
      that was why they turned to Brooke, and Swinburne, and Shelley.
      Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich
      and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his
      imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep
      love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.

      One poem they read over and over; Swinburne’s “Triumph of Time,”
      and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights
      when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the
      low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the
      night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its
      tone of a fleecy-headed drum, repeating:

   “Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour, To think of things that
   are well outworn; Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dream
   foregone and the deed foreborne?”

      They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told
      him her history. The Ramillys were two: old Mr. Ramilly and his
      granddaughter, Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless
      mother whom Amory imagined to have been very like his own, on
      whose death she had come to America, to live in Maryland. She had
      gone to Baltimore first to stay with a bachelor uncle, and there
      she insisted on being a debutante at the age of seventeen. She
      had a wild winter and arrived in the country in March, having
      quarrelled frantically with all her Baltimore relatives, and
      shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowd had come
      out, who drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuously
      condescending and patronizing toward older people, and Eleanor
      with an esprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many
      innocents still redolent of St. Timothy’s and Farmington, into
      paths of Bohemian naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle,
      a forgetful cavalier of a more hypocritical era, there was a
      scene, from which Eleanor emerged, subdued but rebellious and
      indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather who hovered in the
      country on the near side of senility. That’s as far as her story
      went; she told him the rest herself, but that was later.

      Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut
      his mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands
      where the sun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could any
      one possibly think or worry, or do anything except splash and
      dive and loll there on the edge of time while the flower months
      failed. Let the days move over—sadness and memory and pain
      recurred outside, and here, once more, before he went on to meet
      them he wanted to drift and be young.

      There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an
      even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the
      scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick,
      unrelated scenes—two years of sweat and blood, that sudden absurd
      instinct for paternity that Rosalind had stirred; the
      half-sensual, half-neurotic quality of this autumn with Eleanor.
      He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever
      spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the
      scrap-book of his life. It was all like a banquet where he sat
      for this half-hour of his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant
      epicurean courses.

      Dimly he promised himself a time where all should be welded
      together. For months it seemed that he had alternated between
      being borne along a stream of love or fascination, or left in an
      eddy, and in the eddies he had not desired to think, rather to be
      picked up on a wave’s top and swept along again.

      “The despairing, dying autumn and our love—how well they
      harmonize!” said Eleanor sadly one day as they lay dripping by
      the water.

      “The Indian summer of our hearts—” he ceased.

      “Tell me,” she said finally, “was she light or dark?”

      “Light.”

      “Was she more beautiful than I am?”

      “I don’t know,” said Amory shortly.

      One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great
      burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with
      Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal
      beauty in curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the
      moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda,
      where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical.

      “Light a match,” she whispered. “I want to see you.”

      Scratch! Flare!

      The night and the scarred trees were like scenery in a play, and
      to be there with Eleanor, shadowy and unreal, seemed somehow
      oddly familiar. Amory thought how it was only the past that ever
      seemed strange and unbelievable. The match went out.

      “It’s black as pitch.”

      “We’re just voices now,” murmured Eleanor, “little lonesome
      voices. Light another.”

      “That was my last match.”

      Suddenly he caught her in his arms.

      “You _are_ mine—you know you’re mine!” he cried wildly... the
      moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened... the
      fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from
      the glory of their eyes.


      THE END OF SUMMER

      “No wind is stirring in the grass; not one wind stirs... the
      water in the hidden pools, as glass, fronts the full moon and so
      inters the golden token in its icy mass,” chanted Eleanor to the
      trees that skeletoned the body of the night. “Isn’t it ghostly
      here? If you can hold your horse’s feet up, let’s cut through the
      woods and find the hidden pools.”

      “It’s after one, and you’ll get the devil,” he objected, “and I
      don’t know enough about horses to put one away in the pitch
      dark.”

      “Shut up, you old fool,” she whispered irrelevantly, and, leaning
      over, she patted him lazily with her riding-crop. “You can leave
      your old plug in our stable and I’ll send him over to-morrow.”

      “But my uncle has got to drive me to the station with this old
      plug at seven o’clock.”

      “Don’t be a spoil-sport—remember, you have a tendency toward
      wavering that prevents you from being the entire light of my
      life.”

      Amory drew his horse up close beside, and, leaning toward her,
      grasped her hand.

      “Say I am—_quick_, or I’ll pull you over and make you ride behind
      me.”

      She looked up and smiled and shook her head excitedly.

      “Oh, do!—or rather, don’t! Why are all the exciting things so
      uncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and ski-ing in Canada?
      By the way, we’re going to ride up Harper’s Hill. I think that
      comes in our programme about five o’clock.”

      “You little devil,” Amory growled. “You’re going to make me stay
      up all night and sleep in the train like an immigrant all day
      to-morrow, going back to New York.”

      “Hush! some one’s coming along the road—let’s go! Whoo-ee-oop!”
      And with a shout that probably gave the belated traveller a
      series of shivers, she turned her horse into the woods and Amory
      followed slowly, as he had followed her all day for three weeks.

      The summer was over, but he had spent the days in watching
      Eleanor, a graceful, facile Manfred, build herself intellectual
      and imaginative pyramids while she revelled in the
      artificialities of the temperamental teens and they wrote poetry
      at the dinner-table.

  When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered
  o’er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed
  her eyes with life and death:
  “Thru Time I’ll save my love!” he said... yet Beauty vanished with
  his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead...
  —Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:
  “Who’d learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet
  there”...  So all my words, however true, might sing you to a
  thousandth June, and no one ever _know_ that you were Beauty for an
  afternoon.

      So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of
      the “Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” and how little we remembered her
      as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare
      _must_ have desired, to have been able to write with such divine
      despair, was that the lady should live... and now we have no real
      interest in her.... The irony of it is that if he had cared
      _more_ for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only
      obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it
      after twenty years....

      This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor. He was leaving in
      the morning and they had agreed to take a long farewell trot by
      the cold moonlight. She wanted to talk, she said—perhaps the last
      time in her life that she could be rational (she meant pose with
      comfort). So they had turned into the woods and rode for half an
      hour with scarcely a word, except when she whispered “Damn!” at a
      bothersome branch—whispered it as no other girl was ever able to
      whisper it. Then they started up Harper’s Hill, walking their
      tired horses.

      “Good Lord! It’s quiet here!” whispered Eleanor; “much more
      lonesome than the woods.”

      “I hate woods,” Amory said, shuddering. “Any kind of foliage or
      underbrush at night. Out here it’s so broad and easy on the
      spirit.”

      “The long slope of a long hill.”

      “And the cold moon rolling moonlight down it.”

      “And thee and me, last and most important.”

      It was quiet that night—the straight road they followed up to the
      edge of the cliff knew few footsteps at any time. Only an
      occasional negro cabin, silver-gray in the rock-ribbed moonlight,
      broke the long line of bare ground; behind lay the black edge of
      the woods like a dark frosting on white cake, and ahead the
      sharp, high horizon. It was much colder—so cold that it settled
      on them and drove all the warm nights from their minds.

      “The end of summer,” said Eleanor softly. “Listen to the beat of
      our horses’ hoofs—‘tump-tump-tump-a-tump.’ Have you ever been
      feverish and had all noises divide into ‘tump-tump-tump’ until
      you could swear eternity was divisible into so many tumps? That’s
      the way I feel—old horses go tump-tump.... I guess that’s the
      only thing that separates horses and clocks from us. Human beings
      can’t go ‘tump-tump-tump’ without going crazy.”

      The breeze freshened and Eleanor pulled her cape around her and
      shivered.

      “Are you very cold?” asked Amory.

      “No, I’m thinking about myself—my black old inside self, the real
      one, with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being
      absolutely wicked by making me realize my own sins.”

      They were riding up close by the cliff and Amory gazed over.
      Where the fall met the ground a hundred feet below, a black
      stream made a sharp line, broken by tiny glints in the swift
      water.

      “Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the
      wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, _why_ am I a girl? Why am I
      not a stupid—? Look at you; you’re stupider than I am, not much,
      but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope
      somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being
      involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be
      justified—and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet
      tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a
      hundred years from now, well and good, but now what’s in store
      for me—I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I’m too
      bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and
      let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention.
      Every year that I don’t marry I’ve got less chance for a
      first-class man. At the best I can have my choice from one or two
      cities and, of course, I have to marry into a dinner-coat.

      “Listen,” she leaned close again, “I like clever men and
      good-looking men, and, of course, no one cares more for
      personality than I do. Oh, just one person in fifty has any
      glimmer of what sex is. I’m hipped on Freud and all that, but
      it’s rotten that every bit of _real_ love in the world is
      ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupcon of jealousy.”
      She finished as suddenly as she began.

      “Of course, you’re right,” Amory agreed. “It’s a rather
      unpleasant overpowering force that’s part of the machinery under
      everything. It’s like an actor that lets you see his mechanics!
      Wait a minute till I think this out....”

      He paused and tried to get a metaphor. They had turned the cliff
      and were riding along the road about fifty feet to the left.

      “You see every one’s got to have some cloak to throw around it.
      The mediocre intellects, Plato’s second class, use the remnants
      of romantic chivalry diluted with Victorian sentiment—and we who
      consider ourselves the intellectuals cover it up by pretending
      that it’s another side of us, has nothing to do with our shining
      brains; we pretend that the fact that we realize it is really
      absolving us from being a prey to it. But the truth is that sex
      is right in the middle of our purest abstractions, so close that
      it obscures vision.... I can kiss you now and will. ...” He
      leaned toward her in his saddle, but she drew away.

      “I can’t—I can’t kiss you now—I’m more sensitive.”

      “You’re more stupid then,” he declared rather impatiently.
      “Intellect is no protection from sex any more than convention
      is...”

      “What is?” she fired up. “The Catholic Church or the maxims of
      Confucius?”

      Amory looked up, rather taken aback.

      “That’s your panacea, isn’t it?” she cried. “Oh, you’re just an
      old hypocrite, too. Thousands of scowling priests keeping the
      degenerate Italians and illiterate Irish repentant with
      gabble-gabble about the sixth and ninth commandments. It’s just
      all cloaks, sentiment and spiritual rouge and panaceas. I’ll tell
      you there is no God, not even a definite abstract goodness; so
      it’s all got to be worked out for the individual by the
      individual here in high white foreheads like mine, and you’re too
      much the prig to admit it.” She let go her reins and shook her
      little fists at the stars.

      “If there’s a God let him strike me—strike me!”

      “Talking about God again after the manner of atheists,” Amory
      said sharply. His materialism, always a thin cloak, was torn to
      shreds by Eleanor’s blasphemy.... She knew it and it angered him
      that she knew it.

      “And like most intellectuals who don’t find faith convenient,” he
      continued coldly, “like Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and the rest of
      your type, you’ll yell loudly for a priest on your death-bed.”

      Eleanor drew her horse up sharply and he reined in beside her.

      “Will I?” she said in a queer voice that scared him. “Will I?
      Watch! _I’m going over the cliff!_” And before he could interfere
      she had turned and was riding breakneck for the end of the
      plateau.

      He wheeled and started after her, his body like ice, his nerves
      in a vast clangor. There was no chance of stopping her. The moon
      was under a cloud and her horse would step blindly over. Then
      some ten feet from the edge of the cliff she gave a sudden shriek
      and flung herself sideways—plunged from her horse and, rolling
      over twice, landed in a pile of brush five feet from the edge.
      The horse went over with a frantic whinny. In a minute he was by
      Eleanor’s side and saw that her eyes were open.

      “Eleanor!” he cried.

      She did not answer, but her lips moved and her eyes filled with
      sudden tears.

      “Eleanor, are you hurt?”

      “No; I don’t think so,” she said faintly, and then began weeping.

      “My horse dead?”

      “Good God—Yes!”

      “Oh!” she wailed. “I thought I was going over. I didn’t know—”

      He helped her gently to her feet and boosted her onto his saddle.
      So they started homeward; Amory walking and she bent forward on
      the pommel, sobbing bitterly.

      “I’ve got a crazy streak,” she faltered, “twice before I’ve done
      things like that. When I was eleven mother went—went mad—stark
      raving crazy. We were in Vienna—”

      All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory’s
      love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from
      habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms,
      nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a
      minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness.
      But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated
      was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn
      like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left
      only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between...
      but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward
      and let new lights come in with the sun.


      A POEM THAT ELEANOR SENT AMORY SEVERAL YEARS LATER

 “Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water, Lisping its music and
 bearing a burden of light, Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant
 daughter... Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.
 Walking alone... was it splendor, or what, we were bound with, Deep in
 the time when summer lets down her hair? Shadows we loved and the
 patterns they covered the ground with Tapestries, mystical, faint in
 the breathless air.
  That was the day... and the night for another story, Pale as a dream
  and shadowed with pencilled trees— Ghosts of the stars came by who
  had sought for glory, Whispered to us of peace in the plaintive
  breeze, Whispered of old dead faiths that the day had shattered,
  Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon; That was the urge
  that we knew and the language that mattered That was the debt that we
  paid to the usurer June.
  Here, deepest of dreams, by the waters that bring not Anything back
  of the past that we need not know, What if the light is but sun and
  the little streams sing not, We are together, it seems... I have
  loved you so... What did the last night hold, with the summer over,
  Drawing us back to the home in the changing glade? _What leered out
  of the dark in the ghostly clover?_ God!... till you stirred in your
  sleep... and were wild afraid...
  Well... we have passed... we are chronicle now to the eerie. Curious
  metal from meteors that failed in the sky; Earth-born the tireless is
  stretched by the water, quite weary, Close to this ununderstandable
  changeling that’s I... Fear is an echo we traced to Security’s
  daughter; Now we are faces and voices... and less, too soon,
  Whispering half-love over the lilt of the water... Youth the penny
  that bought delight of the moon.”


      A POEM AMORY SENT TO ELEANOR AND WHICH HE CALLED “SUMMER STORM”

   “Faint winds, and a song fading and leaves falling, Faint winds, and
   far away a fading laughter... And the rain and over the fields a
   voice calling...
    Our gray blown cloud scurries and lifts above, Slides on the sun
    and flutters there to waft her Sisters on.  The shadow of a dove
    Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings; And down the
    valley through the crying trees The body of the darker storm flies;
    brings With its new air the breath of sunken seas And slender
    tenuous thunder... But I wait... Wait for the mists and for the
    blacker rain— Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate, Happier
    winds that pile her hair; Again They tear me, teach me, strew the
    heavy air Upon me, winds that I know, and storm.
    There was a summer every rain was rare; There was a season every
    wind was warm.... And now you pass me in the mist... your hair
    Rain-blown about you, damp lips curved once more In that wild
    irony, that gay despair That made you old when we have met before;
    Wraith-like you drift on out before the rain, Across the fields,
    blown with the stemless flowers, With your old hopes, dead leaves
    and loves again— Dim as a dream and wan with all old hours
    (Whispers will creep into the growing dark... Tumult will die over
    the trees) Now night Tears from her wetted breast the splattered
    blouse Of day, glides down the dreaming hills, tear-bright, To
    cover with her hair the eerie green... Love for the dusk... Love
    for the glistening after; Quiet the trees to their last tops...
    serene...
    Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter...”




      CHAPTER 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice


      Atlantic City. Amory paced the board walk at day’s end, lulled by
      the everlasting surge of changing waves, smelling the
      half-mournful odor of the salt breeze. The sea, he thought, had
      treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land. It seemed
      still to whisper of Norse galleys ploughing the water world under
      raven-figured flags, of the British dreadnoughts, gray bulwarks
      of civilization steaming up through the fog of one dark July into
      the North Sea.

      “Well—Amory Blaine!”

      Amory looked down into the street below. A low racing car had
      drawn to a stop and a familiar cheerful face protruded from the
      driver’s seat.

      “Come on down, goopher!” cried Alec.

      Amory called a greeting and descending a flight of wooden steps
      approached the car. He and Alec had been meeting intermittently,
      but the barrier of Rosalind lay always between them. He was sorry
      for this; he hated to lose Alec.

      “Mr. Blaine, this is Miss Waterson, Miss Wayne, and Mr. Tully.”

      “How d’y do?”

      “Amory,” said Alec exuberantly, “if you’ll jump in we’ll take you
      to some secluded nook and give you a wee jolt of Bourbon.”

      Amory considered.

      “That’s an idea.”

      “Step in—move over, Jill, and Amory will smile very handsomely at
      you.”

      Amory squeezed into the back seat beside a gaudy,
      vermilion-lipped blonde.

      “Hello, Doug Fairbanks,” she said flippantly. “Walking for
      exercise or hunting for company?”

      “I was counting the waves,” replied Amory gravely. “I’m going in
      for statistics.”

      “Don’t kid me, Doug.”

      When they reached an unfrequented side street Alec stopped the
      car among deep shadows.

      “What you doing down here these cold days, Amory?” he demanded,
      as he produced a quart of Bourbon from under the fur rug.

      Amory avoided the question. Indeed, he had had no definite reason
      for coming to the coast.

      “Do you remember that party of ours, sophomore year?” he asked
      instead.

      “Do I? When we slept in the pavilions up in Asbury Park—”

      “Lord, Alec! It’s hard to think that Jesse and Dick and Kerry are
      all three dead.”

      Alec shivered.

      “Don’t talk about it. These dreary fall days depress me enough.”

      Jill seemed to agree.

      “Doug here is sorta gloomy anyways,” she commented. “Tell him to
      drink deep—it’s good and scarce these days.”

      “What I really want to ask you, Amory, is where you are—”

      “Why, New York, I suppose—”

      “I mean to-night, because if you haven’t got a room yet you’d
      better help me out.”

      “Glad to.”

      “You see, Tully and I have two rooms with bath between at the
      Ranier, and he’s got to go back to New York. I don’t want to have
      to move. Question is, will you occupy one of the rooms?”

      Amory was willing, if he could get in right away.

      “You’ll find the key in the office; the rooms are in my name.”

      Declining further locomotion or further stimulation, Amory left
      the car and sauntered back along the board walk to the hotel.

      He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire
      to work or write, love or dissipate. For the first time in his
      life he rather longed for death to roll over his generation,
      obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations.
      His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between
      the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party
      of four years before. Things that had been the merest
      commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty
      around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left
      were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

      “To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.” This
      sentence was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he
      felt this was to be one. His mind had already started to play
      variations on the subject. Tireless passion, fierce jealousy,
      longing to possess and crush—these alone were left of all his
      love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss
      of his youth—bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love’s
      exaltation.

      In his room he undressed and wrapping himself in blankets to keep
      out the chill October air drowsed in an armchair by the open
      window.

      He remembered a poem he had read months before:

   “Oh staunch old heart who toiled so long for me, I waste my years
   sailing along the sea—”

      Yet he had no sense of waste, no sense of the present hope that
      waste implied. He felt that life had rejected him.

      “Rosalind! Rosalind!” He poured the words softly into the
      half-darkness until she seemed to permeate the room; the wet salt
      breeze filled his hair with moisture, the rim of a moon seared
      the sky and made the curtains dim and ghostly. He fell asleep.

      When he awoke it was very late and quiet. The blanket had slipped
      partly off his shoulders and he touched his skin to find it damp
      and cold.

      Then he became aware of a tense whispering not ten feet away.

      He became rigid.

      “Don’t make a sound!” It was Alec’s voice. “Jill—do you hear me?”

      “Yes—” breathed very low, very frightened. They were in the
      bathroom.

      Then his ears caught a louder sound from somewhere along the
      corridor outside. It was a mumbling of men’s voices and a
      repeated muffled rapping. Amory threw off the blankets and moved
      close to the bathroom door.

      “My God!” came the girl’s voice again. “You’ll have to let them
      in.”

      “Sh!”

      Suddenly a steady, insistent knocking began at Amory’s hall door
      and simultaneously out of the bathroom came Alec, followed by the
      vermilion-lipped girl. They were both clad in pajamas.

      “Amory!” an anxious whisper.

      “What’s the trouble?”

      “It’s house detectives. My God, Amory—they’re just looking for a
      test-case—”

      “Well, better let them in.”

      “You don’t understand. They can get me under the Mann Act.”

      The girl followed him slowly, a rather miserable, pathetic figure
      in the darkness.

      Amory tried to plan quickly.

      “You make a racket and let them in your room,” he suggested
      anxiously, “and I’ll get her out by this door.”

      “They’re here too, though. They’ll watch this door.”

      “Can’t you give a wrong name?”

      “No chance. I registered under my own name; besides, they’d trail
      the auto license number.”

      “Say you’re married.”

      “Jill says one of the house detectives knows her.”

      The girl had stolen to the bed and tumbled upon it; lay there
      listening wretchedly to the knocking which had grown gradually to
      a pounding. Then came a man’s voice, angry and imperative:

      “Open up or we’ll break the door in!”

      In the silence when this voice ceased Amory realized that there
      were other things in the room besides people... over and around
      the figure crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a
      moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively
      brooding already over the three of them... and over by the window
      among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and
      indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar.... Simultaneously two
      great cases presented themselves side by side to Amory; all that
      took place in his mind, then, occupied in actual time less than
      ten seconds.

      The first fact that flashed radiantly on his comprehension was
      the great impersonality of sacrifice—he perceived that what we
      call love and hate, reward and punishment, had no more to do with
      it than the date of the month. He quickly recapitulated the story
      of a sacrifice he had heard of in college: a man had cheated in
      an examination; his roommate in a gust of sentiment had taken the
      entire blame—due to the shame of it the innocent one’s entire
      future seemed shrouded in regret and failure, capped by the
      ingratitude of the real culprit. He had finally taken his own
      life—years afterward the facts had come out. At the time the
      story had both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the
      truth; that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a
      great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power—to
      certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying
      with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but
      an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to
      ruin—the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible
      might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island
      of despair.

      ... Amory knew that afterward Alec would secretly hate him for
      having done so much for him....

      ... All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while
      ulterior to him and speculating upon him were those two
      breathless, listening forces: the gossamer aura that hung over
      and about the girl and that familiar thing by the window.

      Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal;
      sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

      _Weep not for me but for thy children._

      That—thought Amory—would be somehow the way God would talk to me.

      Amory felt a sudden surge of joy and then like a face in a
      motion-picture the aura over the bed faded out; the dynamic
      shadow by the window, that was as near as he could name it,
      remained for the fraction of a moment and then the breeze seemed
      to lift it swiftly out of the room. He clinched his hands in
      quick ecstatic excitement... the ten seconds were up....

      “Do what I say, Alec—do what I say. Do you understand?”

      Alec looked at him dumbly—his face a tableau of anguish.

      “You have a family,” continued Amory slowly. “You have a family
      and it’s important that you should get out of this. Do you hear
      me?” He repeated clearly what he had said. “Do you hear me?”

      “I hear you.” The voice was curiously strained, the eyes never
      for a second left Amory’s.

      “Alec, you’re going to lie down here. If any one comes in you act
      drunk. You do what I say—if you don’t I’ll probably kill you.”

      There was another moment while they stared at each other. Then
      Amory went briskly to the bureau and, taking his pocket-book,
      beckoned peremptorily to the girl. He heard one word from Alec
      that sounded like “penitentiary,” then he and Jill were in the
      bathroom with the door bolted behind them.

      “You’re here with me,” he said sternly. “You’ve been with me all
      evening.”

      She nodded, gave a little half cry.

      In a second he had the door of the other room open and three men
      entered. There was an immediate flood of electric light and he
      stood there blinking.

      “You’ve been playing a little too dangerous a game, young man!”

      Amory laughed.

      “Well?”

      The leader of the trio nodded authoritatively at a burly man in a
      check suit.

      “All right, Olson.”

      “I got you, Mr. O’May,” said Olson, nodding. The other two took a
      curious glance at their quarry and then withdrew, closing the
      door angrily behind them.

      The burly man regarded Amory contemptuously.

      “Didn’t you ever hear of the Mann Act? Coming down here with
      her,” he indicated the girl with his thumb, “with a New York
      license on your car—to a hotel like _this_.” He shook his head
      implying that he had struggled over Amory but now gave him up.

      “Well,” said Amory rather impatiently, “what do you want us to
      do?”

      “Get dressed, quick—and tell your friend not to make such a
      racket.” Jill was sobbing noisily on the bed, but at these words
      she subsided sulkily and, gathering up her clothes, retired to
      the bathroom. As Amory slipped into Alec’s B. V. D.’s he found
      that his attitude toward the situation was agreeably humorous.
      The aggrieved virtue of the burly man made him want to laugh.

      “Anybody else here?” demanded Olson, trying to look keen and
      ferret-like.

      “Fellow who had the rooms,” said Amory carelessly. “He’s drunk as
      an owl, though. Been in there asleep since six o’clock.”

      “I’ll take a look at him presently.”

      “How did you find out?” asked Amory curiously.

      “Night clerk saw you go up-stairs with this woman.”

      Amory nodded; Jill reappeared from the bathroom, completely if
      rather untidily arrayed.

      “Now then,” began Olson, producing a note-book, “I want your real
      names—no damn John Smith or Mary Brown.”

      “Wait a minute,” said Amory quietly. “Just drop that big-bully
      stuff. We merely got caught, that’s all.”

      Olson glared at him.

      “Name?” he snapped.

      Amory gave his name and New York address.

      “And the lady?”

      “Miss Jill—”

      “Say,” cried Olson indignantly, “just ease up on the nursery
      rhymes. What’s your name? Sarah Murphy? Minnie Jackson?”

      “Oh, my God!” cried the girl cupping her tear-stained face in her
      hands. “I don’t want my mother to know. I don’t want my mother to
      know.”

      “Come on now!”

      “Shut up!” cried Amory at Olson.

      An instant’s pause.

      “Stella Robbins,” she faltered finally. “General Delivery,
      Rugway, New Hampshire.”

      Olson snapped his note-book shut and looked at them very
      ponderously.

      “By rights the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police
      and you’d go to penitentiary, you would, for bringin’ a girl from
      one State to ’nother f’r immoral purp’ses—” He paused to let the
      majesty of his words sink in. “But—the hotel is going to let you
      off.”

      “It doesn’t want to get in the papers,” cried Jill fiercely. “Let
      us off! Huh!”

      A great lightness surrounded Amory. He realized that he was safe
      and only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he
      might have incurred.

      “However,” continued Olson, “there’s a protective association
      among the hotels. There’s been too much of this stuff, and we got
      a ’rangement with the newspapers so that you get a little free
      publicity. Not the name of the hotel, but just a line sayin’ that
      you had a little trouble in ’lantic City. See?”

      “I see.”

      “You’re gettin’ off light—damn light—but—”

      “Come on,” said Amory briskly. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t
      need a valedictory.”

      Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at
      Alec’s still form. Then he extinguished the lights and motioned
      them to follow him. As they walked into the elevator Amory
      considered a piece of bravado—yielded finally. He reached out and
      tapped Olson on the arm.

      “Would you mind taking off your hat? There’s a lady in the
      elevator.”

      Olson’s hat came off slowly. There was a rather embarrassing two
      minutes under the lights of the lobby while the night clerk and a
      few belated guests stared at them curiously; the loudly dressed
      girl with bent head, the handsome young man with his chin several
      points aloft; the inference was quite obvious. Then the chill
      outdoors—where the salt air was fresher and keener still with the
      first hints of morning.

      “You can get one of those taxis and beat it,” said Olson,
      pointing to the blurred outline of two machines whose drivers
      were presumably asleep inside.

      “Good-by,” said Olson. He reached in his pocket suggestively, but
      Amory snorted, and, taking the girl’s arm, turned away.

      “Where did you tell the driver to go?” she asked as they whirled
      along the dim street.

      “The station.”

      “If that guy writes my mother—”

      “He won’t. Nobody’ll ever know about this—except our friends and
      enemies.”

      Dawn was breaking over the sea.

      “It’s getting blue,” she said.

      “It does very well,” agreed Amory critically, and then as an
      after-thought: “It’s almost breakfast-time—do you want something
      to eat?”

      “Food—” she said with a cheerful laugh. “Food is what queered the
      party. We ordered a big supper to be sent up to the room about
      two o’clock. Alec didn’t give the waiter a tip, so I guess the
      little bastard snitched.”

      Jill’s low spirits seemed to have gone faster than the scattering
      night. “Let me tell you,” she said emphatically, “when you want
      to stage that sorta party stay away from liquor, and when you
      want to get tight stay away from bedrooms.”

      “I’ll remember.”

      He tapped suddenly at the glass and they drew up at the door of
      an all-night restaurant.

      “Is Alec a great friend of yours?” asked Jill as they perched
      themselves on high stools inside, and set their elbows on the
      dingy counter.

      “He used to be. He probably won’t want to be any more—and never
      understand why.”

      “It was sorta crazy you takin’ all that blame. Is he pretty
      important? Kinda more important than you are?”

      Amory laughed.

      “That remains to be seen,” he answered. “That’s the question.”


      THE COLLAPSE OF SEVERAL PILLARS

      Two days later back in New York Amory found in a newspaper what
      he had been searching for—a dozen lines which announced to whom
      it might concern that Mr. Amory Blaine, who “gave his address”
      as, etc., had been requested to leave his hotel in Atlantic City
      because of entertaining in his room a lady _not_ his wife.

      Then he started, and his fingers trembled, for directly above was
      a longer paragraph of which the first words were:

      “Mr. and Mrs. Leland R. Connage are announcing the engagement of
      their daughter, Rosalind, to Mr. J. Dawson Ryder, of Hartford,
      Connecticut—”

      He dropped the paper and lay down on his bed with a frightened,
      sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. She was gone,
      definitely, finally gone. Until now he had half unconsciously
      cherished the hope deep in his heart that some day she would need
      him and send for him, cry that it had been a mistake, that her
      heart ached only for the pain she had caused him. Never again
      could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting her—not this
      Rosalind, harder, older—nor any beaten, broken woman that his
      imagination brought to the door of his forties—Amory had wanted
      her youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff
      that she was selling now once and for all. So far as he was
      concerned, young Rosalind was dead.

      A day later came a crisp, terse letter from Mr. Barton in
      Chicago, which informed him that as three more street-car
      companies had gone into the hands of receivers he could expect
      for the present no further remittances. Last of all, on a dazed
      Sunday night, a telegram told him of Monsignor Darcy’s sudden
      death in Philadelphia five days before.

      He knew then what it was that he had perceived among the curtains
      of the room in Atlantic City.




      CHAPTER 5. The Egotist Becomes a Personage


   “A fathom deep in sleep I lie With old desires, restrained before,
   To clamor lifeward with a cry, As dark flies out the greying door;
   And so in quest of creeds to share I seek assertive day again... But
   old monotony is there: Endless avenues of rain.
    Oh, might I rise again!  Might I Throw off the heat of that old
    wine, See the new morning mass the sky With fairy towers, line on
    line; Find each mirage in the high air A symbol, not a dream
    again... But old monotony is there: Endless avenues of rain.”

      Under the glass portcullis of a theatre Amory stood, watching the
      first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark
      stains on the sidewalk. The air became gray and opalescent; a
      solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then
      another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into
      vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned
      yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxi-cabs sent out
      glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome
      November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and
      pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

      The silence of the theatre behind him ended with a curious
      snapping sound, followed by the heavy roaring of a rising crowd
      and the interlaced clatter of many voices. The matinee was over.

      He stood aside, edged a little into the rain to let the throng
      pass. A small boy rushed out, sniffed in the damp, fresh air and
      turned up the collar of his coat; came three or four couples in a
      great hurry; came a further scattering of people whose eyes as
      they emerged glanced invariably, first at the wet street, then at
      the rain-filled air, finally at the dismal sky; last a dense,
      strolling mass that depressed him with its heavy odor compounded
      of the tobacco smell of the men and the fetid sensuousness of
      stale powder on women. After the thick crowd came another
      scattering; a stray half-dozen; a man on crutches; finally the
      rattling bang of folding seats inside announced that the ushers
      were at work.

      New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed.
      Pallid men rushed by, pinching together their coat-collars; a
      great swarm of tired, magpie girls from a department-store
      crowded along with shrieks of strident laughter, three to an
      umbrella; a squad of marching policemen passed, already
      miraculously protected by oilskin capes.

      The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment, and the numerous
      unpleasant aspects of city life without money occurred to him in
      threatening procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of
      the subway—the car cards thrusting themselves at one, leering out
      like dull bores who grab your arm with another story; the
      querulous worry as to whether some one isn’t leaning on you; a
      man deciding not to give his seat to a woman, hating her for it;
      the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a squalid
      phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the
      smells of the food men ate—at best just people—too hot or too
      cold, tired, worried.

      He pictured the rooms where these people lived—where the patterns
      of the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on
      green and yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and
      gloomy hallways and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the
      buildings; where even love dressed as seduction—a sordid murder
      around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above. And
      always there was the economical stuffiness of indoor winter, and
      the long summers, nightmares of perspiration between sticky
      enveloping walls... dirty restaurants where careless, tired
      people helped themselves to sugar with their own used
      coffee-spoons, leaving hard brown deposits in the bowl.

      It was not so bad where there were only men or else only women;
      it was when they were vilely herded that it all seemed so rotten.
      It was some shame that women gave off at having men see them
      tired and poor—it was some disgust that men had for women who
      were tired and poor. It was dirtier than any battle-field he had
      seen, harder to contemplate than any actual hardship moulded of
      mire and sweat and danger, it was an atmosphere wherein birth and
      marriage and death were loathsome, secret things.

      He remembered one day in the subway when a delivery boy had
      brought in a great funeral wreath of fresh flowers, how the smell
      of it had suddenly cleared the air and given every one in the car
      a momentary glow.

      “I detest poor people,” thought Amory suddenly. “I hate them for
      being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten
      now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world. It’s essentially
      cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and
      poor.” He seemed to see again a figure whose significance had
      once impressed him—a well-dressed young man gazing from a club
      window on Fifth Avenue and saying something to his companion with
      a look of utter disgust. Probably, thought Amory, what he said
      was: “My God! Aren’t people horrible!”

      Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people. He
      thought cynically how completely he was lacking in all human
      sympathy. O. Henry had found in these people romance, pathos,
      love, hate—Amory saw only coarseness, physical filth, and
      stupidity. He made no self-accusations: never any more did he
      reproach himself for feelings that were natural and sincere. He
      accepted all his reactions as a part of him, unchangeable,
      unmoral. This problem of poverty transformed, magnified, attached
      to some grander, more dignified attitude might some day even be
      his problem; at present it roused only his profound distaste.

      He walked over to Fifth Avenue, dodging the blind, black menace
      of umbrellas, and standing in front of Delmonico’s hailed an
      auto-bus. Buttoning his coat closely around him he climbed to the
      roof, where he rode in solitary state through the thin,
      persistent rain, stung into alertness by the cool moisture
      perpetually reborn on his cheek. Somewhere in his mind a
      conversation began, rather resumed its place in his attention. It
      was composed not of two voices, but of one, which acted alike as
      questioner and answerer:

      Question.—Well—what’s the situation?

      Answer.—That I have about twenty-four dollars to my name.

      Q.—You have the Lake Geneva estate.

      A.—But I intend to keep it.

      Q.—Can you live?

      A.—I can’t imagine not being able to. People make money in books
      and I’ve found that I can always do the things that people do in
      books. Really they are the only things I can do.

      Q.—Be definite.

      A.—I don’t know what I’ll do—nor have I much curiosity. To-morrow
      I’m going to leave New York for good. It’s a bad town unless
      you’re on top of it.

      Q.—Do you want a lot of money?

      A.—No. I am merely afraid of being poor.

      Q.—Very afraid?

      A.—Just passively afraid.

      Q.—Where are you drifting?

      A.—Don’t ask _me!_

      Q.—Don’t you care?

      A.—Rather. I don’t want to commit moral suicide.

      Q.—Have you no interests left?

      A.—None. I’ve no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives
      off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off
      calories of virtue. That’s what’s called ingenuousness.

      Q.—An interesting idea.

      A.—That’s why a “good man going wrong” attracts people. They
      stand around and literally _warm themselves_ at the calories of
      virtue he gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and
      the faces simper in delight—“How _innocent_ the poor child is!”
      They’re warming themselves at her virtue. But Sarah sees the
      simper and never makes that remark again. Only she feels a little
      colder after that.

      Q.—All your calories gone?

      A.—All of them. I’m beginning to warm myself at other people’s
      virtue.

      Q.—Are you corrupt?

      A.—I think so. I’m not sure. I’m not sure about good and evil at
      all any more.

      Q.—Is that a bad sign in itself?

      A.—Not necessarily.

      Q.—What would be the test of corruption?

      A.—Becoming really insincere—calling myself “not such a bad
      fellow,” thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the
      delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy.
      Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state
      they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just
      want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want
      to repeat her girlhood—she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t
      want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it
      again.

      Q.—Where are you drifting?

      This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind’s most familiar
      state—a grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior
      impressions and physical reactions.

      One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street—or One Hundred and
      Thirty-seventh Street.... Two and three look alike—no, not much.
      Seat damp... are clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat
      absorbing dryness from clothes?... Sitting on wet substance gave
      appendicitis, so Froggy Parker’s mother said. Well, he’d had
      it—I’ll sue the steamboat company, Beatrice said, and my uncle
      has a quarter interest—did Beatrice go to heaven?... probably
      not—He represented Beatrice’s immortality, also love-affairs of
      numerous dead men who surely had never thought of him... if it
      wasn’t appendicitis, influenza maybe. What? One Hundred and
      Twentieth Street? That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth
      back there. One O Two instead of One Two Seven. Rosalind not like
      Beatrice, Eleanor like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier.
      Apartments along here expensive—probably hundred and fifty a
      month—maybe two hundred. Uncle had only paid hundred a month for
      whole great big house in Minneapolis. Question—were the stairs on
      the left or right as you came in? Anyway, in 12 Univee they were
      straight back and to the left. What a dirty river—want to go down
      there and see if it’s dirty—French rivers all brown or black, so
      were Southern rivers. Twenty-four dollars meant four hundred and
      eighty doughnuts. He could live on it three months and sleep in
      the park. Wonder where Jill was—Jill Bayne, Fayne, Sayne—what the
      devil—neck hurts, darned uncomfortable seat. No desire to sleep
      with Jill, what could Alec see in her? Alec had a coarse taste in
      women. Own taste the best; Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor,
      were all-American. Eleanor would pitch, probably southpaw.
      Rosalind was outfield, wonderful hitter, Clara first base, maybe.
      Wonder what Humbird’s body looked like now. If he himself hadn’t
      been bayonet instructor he’d have gone up to line three months
      sooner, probably been killed. Where’s the darned bell—

      The street numbers of Riverside Drive were obscured by the mist
      and dripping trees from anything but the swiftest scrutiny, but
      Amory had finally caught sight of one—One Hundred and
      Twenty-seventh Street. He got off and with no distinct
      destination followed a winding, descending sidewalk and came out
      facing the river, in particular a long pier and a partitioned
      litter of shipyards for miniature craft: small launches, canoes,
      rowboats, and catboats. He turned northward and followed the
      shore, jumped a small wire fence and found himself in a great
      disorderly yard adjoining a dock. The hulls of many boats in
      various stages of repair were around him; he smelled sawdust and
      paint and the scarcely distinguishable fiat odor of the Hudson. A
      man approached through the heavy gloom.

      “Hello,” said Amory.

      “Got a pass?”

      “No. Is this private?”

      “This is the Hudson River Sporting and Yacht Club.”

      “Oh! I didn’t know. I’m just resting.”

      “Well—” began the man dubiously.

      “I’ll go if you want me to.”

      The man made non-committal noises in his throat and passed on.
      Amory seated himself on an overturned boat and leaned forward
      thoughtfully until his chin rested in his hand.

      “Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man,” he said slowly.


      IN THE DROOPING HOURS

      While the rain drizzled on Amory looked futilely back at the
      stream of his life, all its glitterings and dirty shallows. To
      begin with, he was still afraid—not physically afraid any more,
      but afraid of people and prejudice and misery and monotony. Yet,
      deep in his bitter heart, he wondered if he was after all worse
      than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate
      himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the
      result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged
      at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly:
      “No. Genius!” That was one manifestation of fear, that voice
      which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that
      genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves
      and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to
      mediocrity. Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory
      despised his own personality—he loathed knowing that to-morrow
      and the thousand days after he would swell pompously at a
      compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or
      a first-class actor. He was ashamed of the fact that very simple
      and honest people usually distrusted him; that he had been cruel,
      often, to those who had sunk their personalities in him—several
      girls, and a man here and there through college, that he had been
      an evil influence on; people who had followed him here and there
      into mental adventures from which he alone rebounded unscathed.

      Usually, on nights like this, for there had been many lately, he
      could escape from this consuming introspection by thinking of
      children and the infinite possibilities of children—he leaned and
      listened and he heard a startled baby awake in a house across the
      street and lend a tiny whimper to the still night. Quick as a
      flash he turned away, wondering with a touch of panic whether
      something in the brooding despair of his mood had made a darkness
      in its tiny soul. He shivered. What if some day the balance was
      overturned, and he became a thing that frightened children and
      crept into rooms in the dark, approached dim communion with those
      phantoms who whispered shadowy secrets to the mad of that dark
      continent upon the moon....


      Amory smiled a bit.

      “You’re too much wrapped up in yourself,” he heard some one say.
      And again—

      “Get out and do some real work—”

      “Stop worrying—”

      He fancied a possible future comment of his own.

      “Yes—I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but I soon found it made
      me morbid to think too much about myself.”


      Suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to let himself go to the
      devil—not to go violently as a gentleman should, but to sink
      safely and sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an
      adobe house in Mexico, half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his
      slender, artistic fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened
      to guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of
      Castile and an olive-skinned, carmine-lipped girl caressed his
      hair. Here he might live a strange litany, delivered from right
      and wrong and from the hound of heaven and from every God (except
      the exotic Mexican one who was pretty slack himself and rather
      addicted to Oriental scents)—delivered from success and hope and
      poverty into that long chute of indulgence which led, after all,
      only to the artificial lake of death.

      There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly:
      Port Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the
      South Seas—all lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where
      lust could be a mode and expression of life, where the shades of
      night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of
      passion: the colors of lips and poppies.


      STILL WEEDING

      Once he had been miraculously able to scent evil as a horse
      detects a broken bridge at night, but the man with the queer feet
      in Phoebe’s room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His
      instinct perceived the fetidness of poverty, but no longer
      ferreted out the deeper evils in pride and sensuality.

      There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes; Burne
      Holiday was sunk from sight as though he had never lived;
      Monsignor was dead. Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a
      thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to
      know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had
      once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely
      repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from
      mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best
      mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom. The
      pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession
      of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans,
      Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni
      at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams,
      personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on
      his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the
      tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing
      what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had
      depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the
      theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his
      mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

      Women—of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped
      to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts,
      marvellously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to
      perpetuate in terms of experience—had become merely consecrations
      to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were
      all removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed,
      from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart
      and a page of puzzled words to write.

      Amory based his loss of faith in help from others on several
      sweeping syllogisms. Granted that his generation, however bruised
      and decimated from this Victorian war, were the heirs of
      progress. Waving aside petty differences of conclusions which,
      although they might occasionally cause the deaths of several
      millions of young men, might be explained away—supposing that
      after all Bernard Shaw and Bernhardi, Bonar Law and
      Bethmann-Hollweg were mutual heirs of progress if only in
      agreeing against the ducking of witches—waiving the antitheses
      and approaching individually these men who seemed to be the
      leaders, he was repelled by the discrepancies and contradictions
      in the men themselves.

      There was, for example, Thornton Hancock, respected by half the
      intellectual world as an authority on life, a man who had
      verified and believed the code he lived by, an educator of
      educators, an adviser to Presidents—yet Amory knew that this man
      had, in his heart, leaned on the priest of another religion.

      And Monsignor, upon whom a cardinal rested, had moments of
      strange and horrible insecurity—inexplicable in a religion that
      explained even disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you
      doubted the devil it was the devil that made you doubt him. Amory
      had seen Monsignor go to the houses of stolid philistines, read
      popular novels furiously, saturate himself in routine, to escape
      from that horror.

      And this priest, a little wiser, somewhat purer, had been, Amory
      knew, not essentially older than he.

      Amory was alone—he had escaped from a small enclosure into a
      great labyrinth. He was where Goethe was when he began “Faust”;
      he was where Conrad was when he wrote “Almayer’s Folly.”

      Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of
      people who through natural clarity or disillusion left the
      enclosure and sought the labyrinth. There were men like Wells and
      Plato, who had, half unconsciously, a strange, hidden orthodoxy,
      who would accept for themselves only what could be accepted for
      all men—incurable romanticists who never, for all their efforts,
      could enter the labyrinth as stark souls; there were on the other
      hand sword-like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan,
      Voltaire, who progressed much slower, yet eventually much
      further, not in the direct pessimistic line of speculative
      philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach a
      positive value to life....

      Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a
      strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams. They were too
      easy, too dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually
      reached the public after thirty years in some such form: Benson
      and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had
      sugar-coated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the
      street heard the conclusions of dead genius through some one
      else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

      Life was a damned muddle... a football game with every one
      off-side and the referee gotten rid of—every one claiming the
      referee would have been on his side....

      Progress was a labyrinth... people plunging blindly in and then
      rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it... the
      invisible king—the elan vital—the principle of evolution...
      writing a book, starting a war, founding a school....

      Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all
      inquiries with himself. He was his own best example—sitting in
      the rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and
      his own temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved
      to help in building up the living consciousness of the race.

      In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the
      entrance of the labyrinth.


      Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi
      hurried along the street, its lamps still shining like burning
      eyes in a face white from a night’s carouse. A melancholy siren
      sounded far down the river.


      MONSIGNOR

      Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own
      funeral. It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical. Bishop
      O’Neill sang solemn high mass and the cardinal gave the final
      absolutions. Thornton Hancock, Mrs. Lawrence, the British and
      Italian ambassadors, the papal delegate, and a host of friends
      and priests were there—yet the inexorable shears had cut through
      all these threads that Monsignor had gathered into his hands. To
      Amory it was a haunting grief to see him lying in his coffin,
      with closed hands upon his purple vestments. His face had not
      changed, and, as he never knew he was dying, it showed no pain or
      fear. It was Amory’s dear old friend, his and the others’—for the
      church was full of people with daft, staring faces, the most
      exalted seeming the most stricken.

      The cardinal, like an archangel in cope and mitre, sprinkled the
      holy water; the organ broke into sound; the choir began to sing
      the Requiem Eternam.

      All these people grieved because they had to some extent depended
      upon Monsignor. Their grief was more than sentiment for the
      “crack in his voice or a certain break in his walk,” as Wells put
      it. These people had leaned on Monsignor’s faith, his way of
      finding cheer, of making religion a thing of lights and shadows,
      making all light and shadow merely aspects of God. People felt
      safe when he was near.

      Of Amory’s attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full
      realization of his disillusion, but of Monsignor’s funeral was
      born the romantic elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him. He
      found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always
      would want—not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved,
      as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to
      be indispensable; he remembered the sense of security he had
      found in Burne.

      Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory
      suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been
      playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and
      nothing matters very much.”

      On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a
      sense of security.


      THE BIG MAN WITH GOGGLES

      On the day that Amory started on his walk to Princeton the sky
      was a colorless vault, cool, high and barren of the threat of
      rain. It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a
      day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day
      easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that
      dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the
      light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical
      severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a
      monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.

      The day had put Amory in such a contemplative mood that he caused
      much annoyance to several motorists who were forced to slow up
      considerably or else run him down. So engrossed in his thoughts
      was he that he was scarcely surprised at that strange
      phenomenon—cordiality manifested within fifty miles of
      Manhattan—when a passing car slowed down beside him and a voice
      hailed him. He looked up and saw a magnificent Locomobile in
      which sat two middle-aged men, one of them small and anxious
      looking, apparently an artificial growth on the other who was
      large and begoggled and imposing.

      “Do you want a lift?” asked the apparently artificial growth,
      glancing from the corner of his eye at the imposing man as if for
      some habitual, silent corroboration.

      “You bet I do. Thanks.”

      The chauffeur swung open the door, and, climbing in, Amory
      settled himself in the middle of the back seat. He took in his
      companions curiously. The chief characteristic of the big man
      seemed to be a great confidence in himself set off against a
      tremendous boredom with everything around him. That part of his
      face which protruded under the goggles was what is generally
      termed “strong”; rolls of not undignified fat had collected near
      his chin; somewhere above was a wide thin mouth and the rough
      model for a Roman nose, and, below, his shoulders collapsed
      without a struggle into the powerful bulk of his chest and belly.
      He was excellently and quietly dressed. Amory noticed that he was
      inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur’s head as
      if speculating steadily but hopelessly some baffling hirsute
      problem.

      The smaller man was remarkable only for his complete submersion
      in the personality of the other. He was of that lower secretarial
      type who at forty have engraved upon their business cards:
      “Assistant to the President,” and without a sigh consecrate the
      rest of their lives to second-hand mannerisms.

      “Going far?” asked the smaller man in a pleasant disinterested
      way.

      “Quite a stretch.”

      “Hiking for exercise?”

      “No,” responded Amory succinctly, “I’m walking because I can’t
      afford to ride.”

      “Oh.”

      Then again:

      “Are you looking for work? Because there’s lots of work,” he
      continued rather testily. “All this talk of lack of work. The
      West is especially short of labor.” He expressed the West with a
      sweeping, lateral gesture. Amory nodded politely.

      “Have you a trade?”

      No—Amory had no trade.

      “Clerk, eh?”

      No—Amory was not a clerk.

      “Whatever your line is,” said the little man, seeming to agree
      wisely with something Amory had said, “now is the time of
      opportunity and business openings.” He glanced again toward the
      big man, as a lawyer grilling a witness glances involuntarily at
      the jury.

      Amory decided that he must say something and for the life of him
      could think of only one thing to say.

      “Of course I want a great lot of money—”

      The little man laughed mirthlessly but conscientiously.

      “That’s what every one wants nowadays, but they don’t want to
      work for it.”

      “A very natural, healthy desire. Almost all normal people want to
      be rich without great effort—except the financiers in problem
      plays, who want to ‘crash their way through.’ Don’t you want easy
      money?”

      “Of course not,” said the secretary indignantly.

      “But,” continued Amory disregarding him, “being very poor at
      present I am contemplating socialism as possibly my forte.”

      Both men glanced at him curiously.

      “These bomb throwers—” The little man ceased as words lurched
      ponderously from the big man’s chest.

      “If I thought you were a bomb thrower I’d run you over to the
      Newark jail. That’s what I think of Socialists.”

      Amory laughed.

      “What are you,” asked the big man, “one of these parlor
      Bolsheviks, one of these idealists? I must say I fail to see the
      difference. The idealists loaf around and write the stuff that
      stirs up the poor immigrants.”

      “Well,” said Amory, “if being an idealist is both safe and
      lucrative, I might try it.”

      “What’s your difficulty? Lost your job?”

      “Not exactly, but—well, call it that.”

      “What was it?”

      “Writing copy for an advertising agency.”

      “Lots of money in advertising.”

      Amory smiled discreetly.

      “Oh, I’ll admit there’s money in it eventually. Talent doesn’t
      starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists
      draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out
      rag-time for your theatres. By the great commercializing of
      printing you’ve found a harmless, polite occupation for every
      genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist
      who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit—the
      Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine—”

      “Who’s he?” demanded the little man suspiciously.

      “Well,” said Amory, “he’s a—he’s an intellectual personage not
      very well known at present.”

      The little man laughed his conscientious laugh, and stopped
      rather suddenly as Amory’s burning eyes turned on him.

      “What are you laughing at?”

      “These _intellectual_ people—”

      “Do you know what it means?”

      The little man’s eyes twitched nervously.

      “Why, it _usually_ means—”

      “It _always_ means brainy and well-educated,” interrupted Amory.
      “It means having an active knowledge of the race’s experience.”
      Amory decided to be very rude. He turned to the big man. “The
      young man,” he indicated the secretary with his thumb, and said
      young man as one says bell-boy, with no implication of youth,
      “has the usual muddled connotation of all popular words.”

      “You object to the fact that capital controls printing?” said the
      big man, fixing him with his goggles.

      “Yes—and I object to doing their mental work for them. It seemed
      to me that the root of all the business I saw around me consisted
      in overworking and underpaying a bunch of dubs who submitted to
      it.”

      “Here now,” said the big man, “you’ll have to admit that the
      laboring man is certainly highly paid—five and six hour days—it’s
      ridiculous. You can’t buy an honest day’s work from a man in the
      trades-unions.”

      “You’ve brought it on yourselves,” insisted Amory. “You people
      never make concessions until they’re wrung out of you.”

      “What people?”

      “Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by
      inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the
      moneyed class.”

      “Do you imagine that if that road-mender over there had the money
      he’d be any more willing to give it up?”

      “No, but what’s that got to do with it?”

      The older man considered.

      “No, I’ll admit it hasn’t. It rather sounds as if it had though.”

      “In fact,” continued Amory, “he’d be worse. The lower classes are
      narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfish—certainly
      more stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question.”

      “Just exactly what is the question?”

      Here Amory had to pause to consider exactly what the question
      was.


      AMORY COINS A PHRASE

      “When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education,” began
      Amory slowly, “that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times
      out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions
      are concerned. He may be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in
      his own way, but his first job is to provide and to hold fast.
      His wife shoos him on, from ten thousand a year to twenty
      thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasn’t
      any windows. He’s done! Life’s got him! He’s no help! He’s a
      spiritually married man.”

      Amory paused and decided that it wasn’t such a bad phrase.

      “Some men,” he continued, “escape the grip. Maybe their wives
      have no social ambitions; maybe they’ve hit a sentence or two in
      a ‘dangerous book’ that pleased them; maybe they started on the
      treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they’re the
      congressmen you can’t bribe, the Presidents who aren’t
      politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who
      aren’t just popular grab-bags for a half-dozen women and
      children.”

      “He’s the natural radical?”

      “Yes,” said Amory. “He may vary from the disillusioned critic
      like old Thornton Hancock, all the way to Trotsky. Now this
      spiritually unmarried man hasn’t direct power, for unfortunately
      the spiritually married man, as a by-product of his money chase,
      has garnered in the great newspaper, the popular magazine, the
      influential weekly—so that Mrs. Newspaper, Mrs. Magazine, Mrs.
      Weekly can have a better limousine than those oil people across
      the street or those cement people ’round the corner.”

      “Why not?”

      “It makes wealthy men the keepers of the world’s intellectual
      conscience and, of course, a man who has money under one set of
      social institutions quite naturally can’t risk his family’s
      happiness by letting the clamor for another appear in his
      newspaper.”

      “But it appears,” said the big man.

      “Where?—in the discredited mediums. Rotten cheap-papered
      weeklies.”

      “All right—go on.”

      “Well, my first point is that through a mixture of conditions of
      which the family is the first, there are these two sorts of
      brains. One sort takes human nature as it finds it, uses its
      timidity, its weakness, and its strength for its own ends.
      Opposed is the man who, being spiritually unmarried, continually
      seeks for new systems that will control or counteract human
      nature. His problem is harder. It is not life that’s complicated,
      it’s the struggle to guide and control life. That is his
      struggle. He is a part of progress—the spiritually married man is
      not.”

      The big man produced three big cigars, and proffered them on his
      huge palm. The little man took one, Amory shook his head and
      reached for a cigarette.

      “Go on talking,” said the big man. “I’ve been wanting to hear one
      of you fellows.”


      GOING FASTER

      “Modern life,” began Amory again, “changes no longer century by
      century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has
      before—populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely
      with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial
      questions, and—we’re _dawdling_ along. My idea is that we’ve got
      to go very much faster.” He slightly emphasized the last words
      and the chauffeur unconsciously increased the speed of the car.
      Amory and the big man laughed; the little man laughed, too, after
      a pause.

      “Every child,” said Amory, “should have an equal start. If his
      father can endow him with a good physique and his mother with
      some common sense in his early education, that should be his
      heritage. If the father can’t give him a good physique, if the
      mother has spent in chasing men the years in which she should
      have been preparing herself to educate her children, so much the
      worse for the child. He shouldn’t be artificially bolstered up
      with money, sent to these horrible tutoring schools, dragged
      through college... Every boy ought to have an equal start.”

      “All right,” said the big man, his goggles indicating neither
      approval nor objection.

      “Next I’d have a fair trial of government ownership of all
      industries.”

      “That’s been proven a failure.”

      “No—it merely failed. If we had government ownership we’d have
      the best analytical business minds in the government working for
      something besides themselves. We’d have Mackays instead of
      Burlesons; we’d have Morgans in the Treasury Department; we’d
      have Hills running interstate commerce. We’d have the best
      lawyers in the Senate.”

      “They wouldn’t give their best efforts for nothing. McAdoo—”

      “No,” said Amory, shaking his head. “Money isn’t the only
      stimulus that brings out the best that’s in a man, even in
      America.”

      “You said a while ago that it was.”

      “It is, right now. But if it were made illegal to have more than
      a certain amount the best men would all flock for the one other
      reward which attracts humanity—honor.”

      The big man made a sound that was very like _boo_.

      “That’s the silliest thing you’ve said yet.”

      “No, it isn’t silly. It’s quite plausible. If you’d gone to
      college you’d have been struck by the fact that the men there
      would work twice as hard for any one of a hundred petty honors as
      those other men did who were earning their way through.”

      “Kids—child’s play!” scoffed his antagonist.

      “Not by a darned sight—unless we’re all children. Did you ever
      see a grown man when he’s trying for a secret society—or a rising
      family whose name is up at some club? They’ll jump when they hear
      the sound of the word. The idea that to make a man work you’ve
      got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom.
      We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any
      other way. We’ve made a world where that’s necessary. Let me tell
      you”—Amory became emphatic—“if there were ten men insured against
      either wealth or starvation, and offered a green ribbon for five
      hours’ work a day and a blue ribbon for ten hours’ work a day,
      nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon. That
      competitive instinct only wants a badge. If the size of their
      house is the badge they’ll sweat their heads off for that. If
      it’s only a blue ribbon, I damn near believe they’ll work just as
      hard. They have in other ages.”

      “I don’t agree with you.”

      “I know it,” said Amory nodding sadly. “It doesn’t matter any
      more though. I think these people are going to come and take what
      they want pretty soon.”

      A fierce hiss came from the little man.

      “_Machine-guns!_”

      “Ah, but you’ve taught them their use.”

      The big man shook his head.

      “In this country there are enough property owners not to permit
      that sort of thing.”

      Amory wished he knew the statistics of property owners and
      non-property owners; he decided to change the subject.

      But the big man was aroused.

      “When you talk of ‘taking things away,’ you’re on dangerous
      ground.”

      “How can they get it without taking it? For years people have
      been stalled off with promises. Socialism may not be progress,
      but the threat of the red flag is certainly the inspiring force
      of all reform. You’ve got to be sensational to get attention.”

      “Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I suppose?”

      “Quite possibly,” admitted Amory. “Of course, it’s overflowing
      just as the French Revolution did, but I’ve no doubt that it’s
      really a great experiment and well worth while.”

      “Don’t you believe in moderation?”

      “You won’t listen to the moderates, and it’s almost too late. The
      truth is that the public has done one of those startling and
      amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years.
      They’ve seized an idea.”

      “What is it?”

      “That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their
      stomachs are essentially the same.”


      THE LITTLE MAN GETS HIS

      “If you took all the money in the world,” said the little man
      with much profundity, “and divided it up in equ—”

      “Oh, shut up!” said Amory briskly and, paying no attention to the
      little man’s enraged stare, he went on with his argument.

      “The human stomach—” he began; but the big man interrupted rather
      impatiently.

      “I’m letting you talk, you know,” he said, “but please avoid
      stomachs. I’ve been feeling mine all day. Anyway, I don’t agree
      with one-half you’ve said. Government ownership is the basis of
      your whole argument, and it’s invariably a beehive of corruption.
      Men won’t work for blue ribbons, that’s all rot.”

      When he ceased the little man spoke up with a determined nod, as
      if resolved this time to have his say out.

      “There are certain things which are human nature,” he asserted
      with an owl-like look, “which always have been and always will
      be, which can’t be changed.”

      Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly.

      “Listen to that! _That’s_ what makes me discouraged with
      progress. _Listen_ to that! I can name offhand over one hundred
      natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man—a
      hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held
      in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been
      for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated
      mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every
      scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher
      that ever gave his life to humanity’s service. It’s a flat
      impeachment of all that’s worth while in human nature. Every
      person over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in
      cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise.”

      The little man leaned back against the seat, his face purple with
      rage. Amory continued, addressing his remarks to the big man.

      “These quarter-educated, stale-minded men such as your friend
      here, who _think_ they think, every question that comes up,
      you’ll find his type in the usual ghastly muddle. One minute it’s
      ‘the brutality and inhumanity of these Prussians’—the next it’s
      ‘we ought to exterminate the whole German people.’ They always
      believe that ‘things are in a bad way now,’ but they ‘haven’t any
      faith in these idealists.’ One minute they call Wilson ‘just a
      dreamer, not practical’—a year later they rail at him for making
      his dreams realities. They haven’t clear logical ideas on one
      single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change.
      They don’t think uneducated people should be highly paid, but
      they won’t see that if they don’t pay the uneducated people their
      children are going to be uneducated too, and we’re going round
      and round in a circle. That—is the great middle class!”

      The big man with a broad grin on his face leaned over and smiled
      at the little man.

      “You’re catching it pretty heavy, Garvin; how do you feel?”

      The little man made an attempt to smile and act as if the whole
      matter were so ridiculous as to be beneath notice. But Amory was
      not through.

      “The theory that people are fit to govern themselves rests on
      this man. If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and
      logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and
      prejudices and sentimentalisms, then I’m a militant Socialist. If
      he can’t, then I don’t think it matters much what happens to man
      or his systems, now or hereafter.”

      “I am both interested and amused,” said the big man. “You are
      very young.”

      “Which may only mean that I have neither been corrupted nor made
      timid by contemporary experience. I possess the most valuable
      experience, the experience of the race, for in spite of going to
      college I’ve managed to pick up a good education.”

      “You talk glibly.”

      “It’s not all rubbish,” cried Amory passionately. “This is the
      first time in my life I’ve argued Socialism. It’s the only
      panacea I know. I’m restless. My whole generation is restless.
      I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most
      beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an
      income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if
      I had no talents I’d not be content to work ten years, condemned
      either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man’s
      son an automobile.”

      “But, if you’re not sure—”

      “That doesn’t matter,” exclaimed Amory. “My position couldn’t be
      worse. A social revolution might land me on top. Of course I’m
      selfish. It seems to me I’ve been a fish out of water in too many
      outworn systems. I was probably one of the two dozen men in my
      class at college who got a decent education; still they’d let any
      well-tutored flathead play football and _I_ was ineligible,
      because some silly old men thought we should _all_ profit by
      conic sections. I loathed the army. I loathed business. I’m in
      love with change and I’ve killed my conscience—”

      “So you’ll go along crying that we must go faster.”

      “That, at least, is true,” Amory insisted. “Reform won’t catch up
      to the needs of civilization unless it’s made to. A laissez-faire
      policy is like spoiling a child by saying he’ll turn out all
      right in the end. He will—if he’s made to.”

      “But you don’t believe all this Socialist patter you talk.”

      “I don’t know. Until I talked to you I hadn’t thought seriously
      about it. I wasn’t sure of half of what I said.”

      “You puzzle me,” said the big man, “but you’re all alike. They
      say Bernard Shaw, in spite of his doctrines, is the most exacting
      of all dramatists about his royalties. To the last farthing.”

      “Well,” said Amory, “I simply state that I’m a product of a
      versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to
      throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my
      heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as
      a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against
      tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.
      I’ve thought I was right about life at various times, but faith
      is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn’t a seeking for the
      grail it may be a damned amusing game.”

      For a minute neither spoke and then the big man asked:

      “What was your university?”

      “Princeton.”

      The big man became suddenly interested; the expression of his
      goggles altered slightly.

      “I sent my son to Princeton.”

      “Did you?”

      “Perhaps you knew him. His name was Jesse Ferrenby. He was killed
      last year in France.”

      “I knew him very well. In fact, he was one of my particular
      friends.”

      “He was—a—quite a fine boy. We were very close.”

      Amory began to perceive a resemblance between the father and the
      dead son and he told himself that there had been all along a
      sense of familiarity. Jesse Ferrenby, the man who in college had
      borne off the crown that he had aspired to. It was all so far
      away. What little boys they had been, working for blue ribbons—

      The car slowed up at the entrance to a great estate, ringed
      around by a huge hedge and a tall iron fence.

      “Won’t you come in for lunch?”

      Amory shook his head.

      “Thank you, Mr. Ferrenby, but I’ve got to get on.”

      The big man held out his hand. Amory saw that the fact that he
      had known Jesse more than outweighed any disfavor he had created
      by his opinions. What ghosts were people with which to work! Even
      the little man insisted on shaking hands.

      “Good-by!” shouted Mr. Ferrenby, as the car turned the corner and
      started up the drive. “Good luck to you and bad luck to your
      theories.”

      “Same to you, sir,” cried Amory, smiling and waving his hand.


      “OUT OF THE FIRE, OUT OF THE LITTLE ROOM”

      Eight hours from Princeton Amory sat down by the Jersey roadside
      and looked at the frost-bitten country. Nature as a rather coarse
      phenomenon composed largely of flowers that, when closely
      inspected, appeared moth-eaten, and of ants that endlessly
      traversed blades of grass, was always disillusioning; nature
      represented by skies and waters and far horizons was more
      likable. Frost and the promise of winter thrilled him now, made
      him think of a wild battle between St. Regis and Groton, ages
      ago, seven years ago—and of an autumn day in France twelve months
      before when he had lain in tall grass, his platoon flattened down
      close around him, waiting to tap the shoulders of a Lewis gunner.
      He saw the two pictures together with somewhat the same primitive
      exaltation—two games he had played, differing in quality of
      acerbity, linked in a way that differed them from Rosalind or the
      subject of labyrinths which were, after all, the business of
      life.

      “I am selfish,” he thought.

      “This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human
      suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’

      “This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living
      part.

      “It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that
      selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

      “There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can
      make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a
      friend, lay down my life for a friend—all because these things
      may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one
      drop of the milk of human kindness.”

      The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of
      sex. He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic
      worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with
      evil was beauty—beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in
      Eleanor’s voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously
      through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half
      darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it
      longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of
      evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the
      beauty of women.

      After all, it had too many associations with license and
      indulgence. Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were
      never good. And in this new loneness of his that had been
      selected for what greatness he might achieve, beauty must be
      relative or, itself a harmony, it would make only a discord.

      In a sense this gradual renunciation of beauty was the second
      step after his disillusion had been made complete. He felt that
      he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of
      artist. It seemed so much more important to be a certain sort of
      man.

      His mind turned a corner suddenly and he found himself thinking
      of the Catholic Church. The idea was strong in him that there was
      a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was
      necessary, and religion to Amory meant the Church of Rome. Quite
      conceivably it was an empty ritual but it was seemingly the only
      assimilative, traditionary bulwark against the decay of morals.
      Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense some
      one must cry: “Thou shalt not!” Yet any acceptance was, for the
      present, impossible. He wanted time and the absence of ulterior
      pressure. He wanted to keep the tree without ornaments, realize
      fully the direction and momentum of this new start.


      The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o’clock to the
      golden beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache
      of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at
      twilight he came to a graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell
      of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and shadows
      everywhere. On an impulse he considered trying to open the door
      of a rusty iron vault built into the side of a hill; a vault
      washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy watery-blue
      flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the touch
      with a sickening odor.

      Amory wanted to feel “William Dayfield, 1864.”

      He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain.
      Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in having lived. All the
      broken columns and clasped hands and doves and angels meant
      romances. He fancied that in a hundred years he would like having
      young people speculate as to whether his eyes were brown or blue,
      and he hoped quite passionately that his grave would have about
      it an air of many, many years ago. It seemed strange that out of
      a row of Union soldiers two or three made him think of dead loves
      and dead lovers, when they were exactly like the rest, even to
      the yellowish moss.


      Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were
      visible, with here and there a late-burning light—and suddenly
      out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream
      it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new
      generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world,
      still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams
      of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting
      the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long
      days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray
      turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more
      than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success;
      grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in
      man shaken....

      Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself—art,
      politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was
      safe now, free from all hysteria—he could accept what was
      acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights....

      There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in
      riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost
      youth—yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his
      soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of
      old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But—oh, Rosalind!
      Rosalind!...

      “It’s all a poor substitute at best,” he said sadly.

      And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he
      had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from
      the personalities he had passed....

      He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

      “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”







        Appendix: Production notes for eBook edition 11

        The primary feature of edition 11 is restoration of em-dashes
        which are missing from edition 10. (My favorite instance is “I
        won’t belong” rather than “I won’t be—long”.)

        Characters which are 8-bit in the printed text were
        misrepresented in edition 10. Edition 10 had some
        end-of-paragraph problems. A handful of other minor errors are
        corrected.

        Two volumes served as reference for edition 11: a 1960 reprint,
        and an undated reprint produced sometime after 1948. There are
        a number of differences between the volumes. Evidence suggests
        that the 1960 reprint has been somewhat “modernized”, and that
        the undated reprint is a better match for the original 1920
        printing. Therefore, when the volumes differ, edition 11 more
        closely follows the undated reprint.

        In edition 11, underscores are used to denote words and phrases
        italicized for emphasis.

        There is a section of text in book 2, chapter 3, beginning with
        “When Vanity kissed Vanity,” which is referred to as “poetry”
        but is formatted as prose.

        I considered, but decided against introducing an 8-bit version
        of edition 11, in large part because the bulk of the 8-bit
        usage (as found in the 1960 reprint) consists of words commonly
        used in their 7-bit form:

  Aeschylus  blase  cafe  debut  debutante  elan  elite  Encyclopaedia
  matinee  minutiae  paean  regime  soupcon  unaesthetic

        Less-commonly-used 8-bit word forms in this book include:

  anaemic  bleme  coeur  manoeuvered  mediaevalist  tete-a-tete and the
  name “Borge”.




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