 Book I. CHAPTER I. OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMMED. THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMMED by F. SCOTFITCH GERROLD. THE VICTOR BELONGS TO THE SPOILS. AND THE NEEPATCH. TO SHANE LESLEY, GEORGE GENE NATHAN, AND MAXWELL PERKINS, IN APPRECIATION OF MUCH LITERARY HELP AND ENCOURAGEMENT. BOOK I. CHAPTER I. ANTHONY PATCH. In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes brush, a sort of intellectual there, yet, at the brink of this story, he has yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him, he wonders frequently whether or not he is without honour and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world, like oil on a clean pond. These occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than anyone else he knows. This was his healthy state, and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy, and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a demulus in determinate heaven, half way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch, not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within and outward, a man who was aware that there could be no honour and yet had honour, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave, a worthy man and his gifted son. Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable, Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded surely on money postulates wealth in the particular. Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as Cross Patch, left his father's farm in Tarry Town early in sixty-one to join a New York Cavalry Regiment. He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill-will he gathered to himself some seventy-five million dollars. This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was then that he determined, after a severe attack of sclerosis, to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world. He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he leveled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind, under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms an all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the age. From an archer in the office of his Tarry Town estate, he directed against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, a campaign which went on through fifteen years, during which he displayed himself a rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, an intolerable bore. The year in which this story opens found him wearying. His campaign had grown desultory. Eighteen sixty-one was creeping up slowly on eighteen ninety-five. His thoughts ran a great deal on the Civil War, somewhat on his dead wife and son, and almost infinitesimally on his grandson Anthony. Early in his career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty, Alicia Withers, who brought him one hundred thousand dollars and an impeccable entree into the banking circles of New York. Immediately, and rather spunkily, she had borne him a son, and as if completely divitalized by the magnificence of this performance, she had thenceforth effaced herself within the shadowy dimensions of the nursery. The boy, Adam Ulysses Patch, became an inveterate joiner of clubs, connoisseur of good form, and driver of tandems. At the astonishing age of twenty-six he began his memoirs under the title, New York Society as I have seen it. On the rumor of its conception this work was eagerly bid for among publishers, but as it proved after his death to be immoderately verbose and overpoweringly dull, it never obtained even a private printing. This Fifth Avenue Chesterfield married at twenty-two. His wife was Henrietta Lebrun, the Boston Society Contralto, and the single child of the Union was, at the request of his grandfather, christened Anthony Comstock Patch. When he went to Harvard the Comstock dropped out of his name to another hell of oblivion and was never heard of thereafter. Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together, so often had it faced his eyes in childhood, that it had acquired the impersonality of furniture, but everyone who came into his bedroom regarded it with interest. It showed a dandy of the nineties, spare and handsome, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a little boy with long brown curls dressed in a velvet Lord Fontalvor suit. This was Anthony at five, the year of his mother's death. His memories of the Boston Society Contralto were nebulous and musical. She was a lady who sang, sang, sang in the music room of their house in Washington Square. Sometimes with guests scattered all about her, the men with their arms folded, balanced breathlessly on the edges of sofas, the women with their hands in their laps, occasionally making little whispers to the men, and always clapping very briskly and uttering cooing cries after each song. And often she sang to Anthony alone, in Italian or French, or in a strange and terrible dialect which she imagined to be the speech of the Southern Negro. His recollections of the gallant Ulysses, the first man in America to roll the lapels of his coat, were much more vivid. After Henrietta LeBron-Patt had joined another choir, as her widower huskily remarked from time to time, father and son lived up at Grandpa's in Tarrytown, and Ulysses came daily to Anthony's nursery and expelled pleasant, thick-smelling words for sometimes as much as an hour. He was continually promising Anthony hunting trips and fishing trips and excursions to Atlantic City, oh, some time soon now, but none of them ever materialised. One trip they did take. When Anthony was eleven they went abroad to England and Switzerland, and there in the best hotel in Lucerne his father died with much sweating and grunting and crying aloud for air. In a panic of despair and terror Anthony was brought back to America, wedded to a vague melancholy that was to stay beside him through the rest of his life, past in person of the hero. At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his parents had died, and his grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly until, for the first time since her marriage, her person held for one day an unquestioned supremacy over her own drawing-room. So to Anthony life was a struggle against death that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed. It soothed him. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with a light still on. His favourite diversion until he was fourteen was his stamp collection, enormous, as nearly exhaustive as a boy's could be. His grandfather considered fatuously that it was teaching him geography. So Anthony kept up a correspondence with a half-dozen stamp and coin companies, and it was rare that the mail failed to bring him new stamp books or packages of glittering approval sheets. There was a mysterious fascination in transferring his acquisitions interminably from one book to another. His stamps were his greatest happiness, and he bestowed impatient frowns on anyone who interrupted him at play with them. They devoured his allowance every month, and he lay awake at night musing untiringly on their variety and many-coloured spunder. At sixteen he had lived almost entirely within himself, an inarticulate boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely bewildered by his contemporaries. The two preceding years had been spent in Europe with a private tutor who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing, it would open doors, it would be a tremendous tonic, it would give him innumerable self-sacrificing and devoted friends. So he went to Harvard. There was no other logical thing to be done with him. Oblivious to the social system, he lived for a while alone and unsought in a high room in Beck Hall, a slim, dark boy of medium height with a shy, sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile first editions of Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy in a yellowed, illegible autograph letter of Keats, finding later that he had been amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy, amassed a rather pathetic collection of silk pajamas, brocaded dressing-gowns, and neck-ties too flamboyant to wear. In this secret finery he would parade before a mirror in his room, or lie stretched and sat in along his window-seat, looking down on the yard, and realizing dimly this clamor, breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have a part. Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him, but secretly pleased him. He began going out, at first a little, and then a great deal. He made the pudding. He drank, quietly, and in the proper tradition. It was said of him that had he not come to college so young he might have done extremely well. In 1909 when he graduated he was only twenty years old. Then abroad again, to Rome this time, where he dallyed with architecture and painting and turn, took up the violin and wrote some ghastly Italian sonnets, supposedly the ruminations of a thirteenth-century monk and the joys of the contemplative life. It became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and discovered with him a many moonlight excursions much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the Republic. Mori Noble from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in the civilization that was very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his grandfathers called on him, and had he so desired he might have been persona grata with a diplomatic set. Indeed he found that his inclinations tended more and more toward conviviality, but that long adolescent aloofness and consequent shyness still dictated his conduct. He returned to America in 1912 because of one of his grandfather's sudden illnesses, and after an excessively tiresome talk with a perpetually convalescent old man, he decided to put off until his grandfather's death the idea of living permanently abroad. After a prolonged search he took an apartment on 52nd Street and to all appearances settled down. In 1913, Anthony Patch's adjustment of himself to the universe was in the process of consummation. Physically he had improved since his undergraduate days. He was still too thin, but his shoulders had widened and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year. He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span. His friends declared that they had never seen his hair crumpled. His nose was too sharp, his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined to droop perceptively in moments of unhappiness, but his blue eyes were charming, whether alert with intelligence or half-close in an expression of melancholy humor. One of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature essential to the Aryan ideal, he was yet, here and there, considered handsome. Moreover he was very clean, in appearance and in reality, with that especial cleanness borrowed from beauty. Their approachless apartment. Fifth and sixth avenues it seemed to Anthony were the uprights of a gigantic ladder stretching from Washington Square to Central Park. Coming uptown on top of a bus toward 52nd Street invariably gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by hand on a series of treacherous rungs, and when the bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he found something akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps to the sidewalk. After that he had but to walk down 52nd Street half a block, pass a stodgy family of brown stone houses, and then in a jiffy he was under the high ceilings of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here after all life began. Here he slept, breakfasted, read and entertained. The house itself was of murky material built in the late nineties. In response to the steadily growing need of small apartments each floor had been thoroughly remodeled and rented individually. Of the four apartments Anthony's on the second floor was the most desirable. The front room had fine high ceilings, and three large windows that loomed down pleasantly upon 52nd Street. In its appointments it escaped by a safe margin being of any particular period. It escaped stiffness, stuffiness, bareness and decadence. It smelt neither of smoke nor of incense. It was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep lounge of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting about it like a haze. There was a high screen of Chinese lacquer, chiefly concerned with geometrical fisherman and huntsman in black and gold. This made a corner alcove for a voluminous chair guarded by an orange-colored standing lamp. Deep in the fireplace a corded shield was burned to a murky black. Passing through the dining-room, which, as Anthony took only breakfast at home, was merely a magnificent potentiality, and down a comparatively long hall one came to the heart and core of the apartment, Anthony's bedroom and bath. Both of them were immense. Under the ceilings of the former even the great canopy bed seemed of only average size. On the floor an exotic rug of crimson velvet was softest fleece on his bare feet. His bathroom, in contrast to the rather portentous character of his bedroom, was gay, bright, extremely habitable, and even faintly facetious. Framed around the walls were photographs of four celebrated thespian beauties of the day. Julius Sanderson as the sunshine girl, Ena Clare as the Quaker girl, Billy Burke as the Mind the Paint girl, and Hazel Dawn as the Pink Lady. Between Billy Burke and Hazel Dawn hung a print representing a great stretch of snow presided over by a cold and formidable sun. This, claimed Anthony, symbolized the cold shower. The bathtub, equipped with an ingenious book-holder, was low and large. Inside it a wall wardrobe bulged with sufficient line for three men and with a generation of neckties. There was no skimpy glorified towel of a carpet. Instead a rich rug, like the one in his bedroom, a miracle of softness, that seemed almost to massage the wet foot emerging from the tub. All in all a room to conjure with. It was easy to see that Anthony dressed there, arranged his immaculate hair there, in fact did everything but sleep and eat there. It was his pride this bathroom. He felt that if he had a love he would have hung her picture just facing the tub so that, lost in the soothing steamings of the hot water, he might lie and look up at her amused warmly and sensuously on her beauty. Nor does he spin. The apartment was kept clean by an English servant with a singularly, almost theatrically appropriate name of Bounds, whose technique was marred only by the fact that he wore a soft collar. Had he been entirely Anthony's Bounds, this defect would have been summarily remedied, but he was also the Bounds of two other gentlemen in the neighborhood. From eight until eleven in the morning he was entirely Anthony's. He arrived with the mail and cooked breakfast. At nine-thirty he pulled the edge of Anthony's blanket and spoke a few terse words. Anthony never remembered clearly what they were and rather suspected that they were deprecative. Then he served breakfast on a card-table in the front room, made the bed, and, after asking with some hostility if there was anything else, withdrew. In the mornings, at least once a week, Anthony went to see his broker. His income was slightly under seven thousand a year, the interest on money inherited from his mother. His grandfather, who had never allowed his own son to graduate from a very liberal allowance, judged that this sum was sufficient for young Anthony's needs. Every Christmas he sent him a five hundred dollar bond, which Anthony usually sold, if possible, as he was always a little, not very, hard up. The visits to his broker varied from semi-social chats to discussions of the safety of eight percent investments, and Anthony always enjoyed them. The Big Trust Company building seemed to link him definitely to the great fortunes whose solidarity he respected and to assure him that he was adequately chaperoned by the hierarchy of finance. From these hurried men he derived the same sense of safety that he had in contemplating his grandfather's money. Even more, for the latter appeared, vaguely, a demand-loan made by the world to Adam Patch's own moral righteousness, while this money downtown seemed rather to have been grasped and held by sheer indomitable strengths and tremendous feats of will. In addition, it seemed more definitely and explicitly money. Close as Anthony trod on the heels of his income, he considered it to be enough. On Golden Day, of course, he would have many millions. Meanwhile, he possessed a raison d'etre in the theoretical creation of essays on the popes of the Renaissance. This flashes back to the conversation with his grandfather immediately upon his return from Rome. He had hoped to find his grandfather dead, but had learned by telephoning from the pier that Adam Patch was comparatively well again. The next day he had concealed his disappointment and gone out to Tarrytown. Five miles from the station, his taxicab entered an elaborately groomed drive that threaded a veritable maze of walls and wire fences guarding the estate. This, said the public, was because it was definitively known that if the socialists had their way one of the first men they'd assassinate would be Old Cross Patch. Anthony was late, and the venerable philanthropist was awaiting him in a glass-walled sun-parler where he was glancing through the morning papers for the second time. The secretary, Edward Shettleworth, who before his regeneration had been gambler, saloon-keeper, and general reprobate, ushered Anthony into the room, exhibiting his redeemer and benefactor as though he were displaying a treasure of immense value. This shook hands gravely. I'm awfully glad to hear you're better, Anthony said. The senior Patch, with an air of having seen his grandson only last week, pulled out his watch. Being late, he asked mildly. It had irritated him to wait for Anthony. He was under the delusion not only that in his youth he had handled his practical affairs with the utmost scrupulousness, even to keeping every engagement on the dot, but also that this was the direct and primary cause of his success. It's been late a good deal this month, he remarked, with a shade of meek accusation in his voice. And then, after a long sigh, sit down. Anthony surveyed his grandfather with that tacit amazement which always attended the sight. That this feeble, unintelligent old man was possessed of such power that, yellow journals to the contrary, the men in the republic whose souls he could not have bought directly or indirectly would scarcely have populated white plains, seemed as impossible to believe as that he had once been a pink and white baby. The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows. The first quarter century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the girth of one arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one, suspended his small eyes in dark bluish sacks, tweaked out his hairs, changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in others, callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a paint box. Then through his body and his soul it had attacked his brain. It had sent him night sweats and tears and unfounded dreads. It had split his intense normality into cojulity and suspicion. Out of the coarse material of his enthusiasm it had cut dozens of meek but petulant obsessions. His energy was shrunk to the bad temper of a spoiled child, and for his will to power was substituted a fatuous, quarrel desire for a land of harps and canticles on earth. The amenities having been gingerly touched upon, Anthony felt that he was expected to outline his intentions, and simultaneously a glimmer in the old man's eye warned him against broaching, for the present, his desire to live abroad. He wished that Shuddleworth would have tacked enough to leave the room. He detested Shuddleworth. But the secretary had settled blandly in a rocker and was dividing between the two patches the glances of his faded eyes. "'Now that you're here, you ought to do something,' said his grandfather softly, "'accomplish something.'" He waited for him to speak of leaving something done when you pass on. Then he made a suggestion. "'I thought, it seemed to me that perhaps I'm best qualified to write.'" Adam Patch winced, visualizing a family poet with long hair and three mistresses. "'History,' finished Anthony. "'History? History of what? The Civil War? The Revolution? Why, no, sir, a history of the Middle Ages. Seriously, an idea was born for the history of the Renaissance popes written from some novel angle. Still, he was glad he had said Middle Ages. "'Middle Ages? Why not your own country? Something you know about?' "'Well, you see, I've lived so much abroad. Why you should write about the Middle Ages, I don't know. Dark Ages, we used to call them. Nobody knows what happened, and nobody cares except that they're over now.'" He continued for some minutes on the uselessness of such information, touching, naturally, on the Spanish Inquisition and the corruption of the monasteries. Then, do you really think you'll be able to do any work in New York, or do you really intend to work at all? This lasts with soft, almost imperceptible cynicism. "'Why, yes, I do, sir. When will you be done?' "'Well, there'll be an outline, you see, and a lot of preliminary reading. I should think you've done enough of that already.'" The conversation worked itself jerkily toward a rather abrupt conclusion when Anthony Rose looked at his watch and remarked that he had an engagement with his broker that afternoon. He had intended to stay a few days with his grandfather, but he was tired and irritated from a rough crossing, and quite unwilling to stand a subtle and sanctimonious brow-beating. He would come out again in a few days, he said. Nevertheless it was due to this encounter that work had come into his life as a permanent idea. During the year that had passed since then he had made several lists of authorities, he had even experimented with chapter titles in the division of his work into periods. But not one line of actual writing existed at present, or seems likely ever to exist. He did nothing, and contrary to the most accredited copy-book logic he had managed to divert himself with more than average content. It was October in 1913, midway in a week of pleasant days, with the sunshine loitering in the cross-streats and the atmosphere so languid as to seem weighted with ghostly falling leaves. It was pleasant to sit lazily by the open window finishing a chapter of Irwan. It was pleasant to yawn about five, toss the book on a table, and saunter humming along the wall to his bath. To you, beautiful lady. He was singing as he turned on the tap. I raise my eyes. To you, beautiful lady. My heart cries. He raised his voice to compete with the flood of water pouring into the tub, and as he looked at the picture of Hazeldon upon the wall he put an imaginary violin to his shoulder and softly caressed it with a phantom bow. Through his closed lips he made a humming-noise which he vaguely imagined resembled the sound of a violin. After a moment his hands ceased their gyrations and wandered to his shirt, which he began to unfasten. Stripped, in adopting an athletic posture like the tiger-skin man in the advertisement, he regarded himself with some satisfaction in the mirror, breaking off to dabble at tentative foot in the tub. Re-adjusting a faucet and indulging in a few preliminary grunts he slid in. Once accustomed to the temperature of the water he relaxed into a state of jowzy content. When he finished his bath he would dress leisurely and walk down Fifth Avenue to the Ritz, where he had an appointment for dinner with his two most frequent companions, Dick Caramel and Mari Noble. Afterward he and Mari were going to the theatre. Caramel would probably trot home and work on his book, which ought to be finished pretty soon. Anthony was glad he wasn't going to work on his book. The notion of sitting down and conjuring up not only words in which to clothe thoughts, but thoughts worthy of being clothed. The whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires. Emerging from his bath he polished himself with the meticulous attention of a boot-black. Then he wandered into the bedroom, and, whistling the while, a weird uncertain melody strolled here and there, butting, adjusting, and enjoying the warmth of the thick carpet on his feet. He lit a cigarette, tossed the match out the open top of the window, then paused in his tracks with a cigarette two inches from his mouth, which fell faintly ajar. His eyes were focused upon a spot of brilliant colour on the roof of a house farther down the alley. It was a girl in a red negligee, silk, surely, drying her hair by the still-hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle had died upon the stiff air of the room. He walked cautiously another step nearer the window, with a sudden impression that she was beautiful. Sitting on the stone parapet beside her was a cushion, the same colour as her garment, and she was leaning both arms upon it as she looked down into the sunny area away where Anthony could hear children playing. He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon, or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful. Then, of a sudden, he understood. It was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul, but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet, for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known. He finished his dressing, found a black bow-tie, and adjusted it carefully by the three-sided mirror in the bathroom. Then, yielding to an impulse, he walked quickly into the bedroom and again looked out the window. The woman was standing up now. He had tossed her hair back, and he had a full view of her. She was fat, full thirty-five, utterly undistinguished. Making a clicking noise with his mouth, he returned to the bathroom and reparted his hair. To you, beautiful lady, he sang lightly, I raise my eyes. Then with a last soothing brush that left an iridescent surface of sheer gloss, he left his bathroom and his apartment, and walked down Fifth Avenue to the Ritz Carlton. Three men. At seven, Anthony and his friend Maury Noble are sitting at a corner table on the cool roofs. Maury Noble is like nothing so much as a large, slender, and imposing cat. His eyes are narrow and full of incessant, protracted blinks. His hair is smooth and flat, as though it has been licked by a possible, and if so, Herculean, mother cat. During Anthony's time at Harvard, he had been considered the most unique figure in his class, the most brilliant, the most original, smart, quiet, and among the saved. This is the man whom Anthony considers his best friend. This is the only man of all his acquaintance whom he admires, and, to a bigger extent than he likes to admit to himself, Envy's. They are glad to see each other now. Their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity, Maury Noble behind that fine and absurdly cat-like face is all but purring, and Anthony, nervous as a will of the wisp, restless. He is at rest now. They are engaged in one of those easy, short-speeched conversations that only men under thirty or men under great stress indulge in. Anthony. Seven o'clock. Where is the caramel? Impatiently. I wish he'd finished that interminable novel. I've spent more time hungry. Maury. He's got a new name for it, the Demon Lover. Not bad, eh? Anthony. Interested. The Demon Lover? Oh, woman-wailing, no, not a bit bad. Not bad at all, do you think? Maury. Rather good. What time did you say? Anthony. Seven. Maury. His eyes narrowing, not unpleasantly, but to express a faint disapproval. Drove me crazy the other day. Anthony. How? Maury. That habit of taking notes. Anthony. Me too. Seems I'd said something night before that he considered material, but he'd forgotten it. So he had at me. He'd say, Can't you try to concentrate? And I'd say, You bore me to tears. How do I remember? Maury laughs noiselessly, by a sort of bland and appreciative widening of his features. Maury. Dick doesn't necessarily see more than anyone else. He merely can put down a larger proportion of what he sees. Anthony. That rather impressive talent. Maury. Oh yes, impressive. Anthony. An energy, ambitious, well-directed energy. He's so entertaining. He's so tremendously stimulating and exciting. Even there's something breathless in being with him. Maury. Oh yes. Silence. And then. Anthony. With his thin, somewhat uncertain face at its most convinced. But not indomitable energy. Some day, bit by bit, it'll blow away, and his rather impressive talent with it, and leave only a wisp of a man, fretful and egotistic and garrulous. Maury. With laughter. Here we sit, vowing to each other, that little dick sees less deeply into things than we do. And I'll bet he feels a measure of superiority on his side. Creative mind over merely critical mind and all that. Anthony. Oh yes. But he's wrong. He's inclined to follow for a million silly enthousiasms. If it wasn't that he's absorbed in realism, and therefore has to adopt the garments of the cynic, he'd be, he'd be credulous as a college religious leader. He's an idealist. Oh yes. He thinks he's not, because he's rejected Christianity. Remember him in college? Just swallow every writer whole, one after another, ideas, technique, and characters. Chesterson, Shaw, Wells. Each one as easily as the last. Maury. Still considering his own last observation. I remember. Anthony. It's true. Natural born fetish worshipper. Take art. Maury. Let's order. He'll be. Anthony. Sure. Let's order. I told him. Maury. Here he comes. I'll bump that waiter. He lifts his finger as a signal, lifts it as though it were a soft and friendly claw. Here you are, Caramel. A new voice. Fiercely. Hello, Maury. Hello, Anthony Comstock Patch. How is old Adam's grandson? Debitant still after you, eh? In person Richard Caramel is short and fair. He is to be bald at thirty-five. He has yellowish eyes, one of them startlingly clear, the other opaque as a muddy pool. And a bulging brow like a funny paper baby. He bulges in other places. His paunch bulges, prophetically. His words have an air of bulging from his mouth. Even his dinner coat pockets bulge as though from contamination with a dog-eared collection of timetables, programs, and miscellaneous scraps. On these he takes his notes with great scurrings up of his unmatched yellow eyes and motions of silence with his disengaged left hand. When he reaches the table he shakes hands with Anthony and Maury. He is one of those men who invariably shake hands, even with people whom they have seen an hour before. Anthony. Hello, Caramel. Glad you're here. We needed a comic relief. Maury, you're late. Been racing the postman down the block? We've been clawing over your character. Dick, fixing Anthony eagerly with the bright eye. What'd you say? Tell me and I'll write it down. Cut three thousand words out of part one this afternoon. Maury. Noble esthete. I poured alcohol into my stomach. Dick, I don't doubt it. I bet you two have been sitting here for an hour talking about liquor. Anthony, we never pass out, my beardless boy. Maury, we never go home with ladies we meet when we're lit. Anthony, all in all our parties are characterized by a certain haughty distinction. Dick, the particularly silly sort who boasts about being tanks. Trouble is you're both in the eighteenth century, school of the old English squire, and quietly to the roll into the table. Never have a good time. Oh, no, that isn't done at all. Anthony, this from chapter six, I'll bet. Dick. Going to the theatre? Maury. Yes, we intend to spend the evening doing some deep thinking over life's problems. The thing is tersely called the woman. I presume that she will pay. Anthony. My God! Is that what it is? Let's go to the follies again. Maury. I'm tired of it. I've seen it three times. To Dick. The first time we went out after Act One and found a most amazing bar. When we came back we entered the wrong theatre. Anthony had a protracted dispute with a scared young couple we thought were in our seats. Dick, as though talking to himself, I think that when I've done another novel and a play, it may be a book of short stories, I'll do a musical comedy. Maury, I know, with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to, and all the critics will groan and grunt about dear old pinafore, and I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless finger in a meaningless world. Dick, pompously. Art isn't meaningless. Maury. It isn't itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so. Anthony. In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grandstand people with ghosts. Maury. Give a good show, anyhow. Anthony. To Maury. On the contrary, I'd feel that it being a meaningless world, why right? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless. Dick. Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want everyone to accept that's Sophistic rot? Anthony. Yeah, I suppose so. Maury. No, sir. I believe that everyone in America but a selected thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of morals. Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don't complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences. Here the soup arrives and what Maury might have gone on to say is lost for all time. Night. Afterward they visited a ticket speculator and at a price obtained seats for a new musical comedy called Hygienx. In the foyer of a theatre they waited a few moments to see the first night crowd come in. There were opera cloaks, stitched of myriad, many-coloured silks and furs. There were jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips of white and rose. There were innumerable broad shimmers down the middles of innumerable silk hats. There were shoes of gold and bronze and red and shining black. There were the high-piled, tight-packed quiffers of many women and the slick-watered hair of well-kept men. First of all there was the ebbing, flowing, chattering, chuckling, foaming, slow-rolling wave effect of this cheerful sea of people, as tonight it poured its glittering torrent into the artificial lake of laughter. After the play they parted. Maury was going to a dance at Sherry's, Anthony Homer and to bed. He found his way slowly over the jostle evening mass of Times Square, which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful and bright and intimate with Carnival. Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin, too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate breaths, poured out into the night. Here for all their vulgarity he thought they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully, swallowing into his lungs perfume and the not unpleasant scent of many cigarettes. He caught the glance of a dark young beauty sitting alone in a closed taxi cab. Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violence, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon. Two young Jewish men passed him, talking in loud voices and craning their necks here and there in fatuous, supercilious glances. They were dressed in suits of the exaggerated tightness, then semi-fashionable. Their turnover collars were notched at the Adam's apple. They wore gray spats and carried gray gloves on their cane handles. Past a bewildered old lady borne along like a basket of eggs between two men who exclaimed to her of the wonders of Times Square, explained them so quickly that the old lady, trying to be impartially interested, waved her head hair in there like a piece of wind-worried old orange peel. Anthony heard a snatch in their conversation. There's the aster, mama! Look! See the chariot-race sign? That's where we were today. No, there! Good gracious! You should worry and grow thin like a dime. He recognized the current Buddhicism of the year, as it issued stridently from one of the pairs at his elbow. And I says to him, I says, the soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter, horses or crows, incessant and loud, with a rumble of the subways underneath, and, overall, the revolutions of light, the growings and receadings of light, light dividing like pearls, forming and reforming and glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky. He turned thankfully down the hush that blew like a dark wind out of a cross-street, past a bakery restaurant in whose windows a dozen roast chickens turned over and over on an automatic spit. From the door came a smell that was hot, doughy, and pink. A drugstore next, exhaling medicines, spilt soda water, and a pleasant undertone from the cosmetic counter. Then a Chinese laundry, still open, steamy and stifling, spelling folded and vaguely yellow. All these depressed him. Reaching Sixth Avenue, he stopped at a corner cigar store and emerged feeling better. The cigar store was cheerful, humanity in a navy blue mist, buying a luxury. Once in his apartment he smoked a last cigarette, sitting in the dark by his open front window. For the first time in over a year he found himself thoroughly enjoying New York. There was a rare pungency in it, certainly, a quality almost southern. Alonesome town, though. He who had grown up alone had lately learned to avoid solitude. During the past several months he had been careful when he had no engagements for the evening to hurry to one of his clubs and find someone. Oh, there was a loneliness here. His cigarette, its smoke bordering the thin folds of curtain with rims of faint white spray, glowed on until the clock in St. Ann's down the street struck one with a quarrelous fashionable beauty. The elevated, half a quiet block away, sounded a rumble of drums, and should he lean from his window he would see the train, like an angry eagle, breasting the dark curve at the corner. He was reminded of a fantastic romance he had lately read in which cities had been bombed from aerial trains, and for a moment he fancied that Washington Square had declared war on Central Park and that this was a northbound menace loaded with battle and sudden death. But as it passed the illusion faded, it diminished to the faintest of drums, then to a faraway droning eagle. There were the bells and the continued low blur of auto-horns from Fifth Avenue, but his own street was silent, and he was safe in here from all the threat of life. For there was his door and the long hall and his guardian bedroom safe, safe. The arclight shining into his window seemed for this hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful than the moon. A flashback in paradise. Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor waiting-room, through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a breathless hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately as they went by, and the winds made a soft incessant flurry in her hair. She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one. The beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting-room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years at peace in the contemplation of herself. It became known to her, at length, that she was to be born again. Sighing, she began a long conversation with a voice that was in the white wind, a conversation that took many hours and of which I can give only a fragment here. Beauty, her lips scarcely stirring, her eyes turned, as always inward upon herself. With or shall I journey now? The voice, to a new country, a land you have never seen before. Beauty, pestilently. I loathe breaking into these new civilizations, how long a stay this time? The voice. Fifteen years. Beauty. And what's the name of the place? The voice. It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth, a land whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest, a land where the rulers have minds like little children, and the law givers believe in Santa Claus, where ugly women control strong men. Beauty, an astonishment. What? The voice. Very much depressed. Yes, it is truly a melancholy spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in broad daylight, saying Do this, and do that, and all the men, even those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women, to whom they refer sonorously either as Mrs. So-and-So, or as the wife. Beauty. But this can't be true. I can understand, of course, their obedience to women of charm, but to fat women? To bony women? To women with scrawny cheeks? The voice. Even so. Beauty. What of me? What chance shall I have? The voice. It will be harder going if I may borrow a phrase. Beauty, after a dissatisfied pause. Why not the old lands, the lands of grapes and soft-tongued men, or the land of ships and seas? The voice. It's expected that they'll be very busy shortly. Beauty. Oh. The voice. Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror. Beauty. What will I be? Tell me. The voice. At first it was thought that you would go this time as an actress in the motion pictures, but, after all, it's not advisable. You will be disguised during your fifteen years as what is called a society girl. Beauty. What's that? There is a new sound in the wind which must, for our purposes, be interpreted as the voice scratching its head. The voice. At length. It's a sort of bogus aristocrat. Beauty. Bogus? What is bogus? The voice. That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much that is bogus. Also you will do much that is bogus. Beauty, classically. It all sounds so vulgar. The voice. Not half as vulgar as it is. You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you dance the old ones. Beauty in a whisper. Will I be paid? The voice. Yes, as usual, in love. Beauty with a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the immobility of her lips. And will I like being called a jazz baby? The voice. Somerly. You will love it. The dialogue ends here, with Beauty still sitting quietly, the stars pausing in an ecstasy of appreciation. The wind, white and gusty, blowing through her hair. All this took place seven years before Anthony sat by the front windows of his apartment and listened to the chimes of St. Anne's. End of Book 1, Chapter 1. Book 1, Chapter 2, Part 1 of 2 of The Beautiful and Damned. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Book 1, Chapter 2, Portrait of a Siren, Part 1 of 2. Crispness folded down upon New York a month later, bringing a November and the three big football games, and a great fluttering of furs along Fifth Avenue. It brought also a sense of tension to the city and suppressed excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony's mail. Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition, a tremendous undaunted ambition toward the first three dozen young men, who were, of course, invited to each of the ninety-six parties, as were the young ladies' group of family friends, acquaintances, college boys, and eager young outsiders. To continue there was a third layer from the skirts of the city, from Newark and the Jersey suburbs up to Bitter Connecticut, and the ineligible sections of Long Island and doubtless contiguous layers down to the city's shoes. Ladies were coming out into a society of Jewish men and women, from Riverside to the Bronx, and looking forward to a rising young broker or jeweler in a kosher wedding. Irish girls were casting their eyes, with license at last to do so, upon a society of young taminy politicians, pious undertakers, and grown-up choir boys. And naturally the city caught the contagious air of entree, the working girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing finery in the big stores, dreamed that, perhaps in the spectacular excitement of this winter, they might obtain for themselves the coveted mail, as in a muddled carnival crowd, an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke, and the subway's foulness was freshened, and the actresses came out in new plays, and the publishers came out with new books, and the castles came out with new dances, and the railroads came out with new schedules containing new mistakes, instead of the old ones that the commuters had grown used to. The city was coming out. Anthony, walking along 42nd Street one afternoon under a steel-gray sky, ran unexpectedly into Richard Caramel, emerging from the Manhattan Hotel Barbershop. It was a cold day, the first definitely cold day, and Caramel had on one of those knee-length, sheep-lined coats, long worn by the working men of the Middle West, that were just coming into fashionable approval. His soft hat was of a discreet dark brown, and from under it his weird eye flamed like a topaz. He stopped Anthony enthusiastically, slapping him on the arms more from a desire to keep himself warm than from playfulness, and after his inevitable handshake exploded into sound. Cold as the devil! Good Lord! I've been working like the deuce all day, till my room got so cold I thought I'd get pneumonia. One landlady, economizing on coal, came up when I yelled over the stairs for her for half an hour, began explaining why at all. God! First she drove me crazy, then I began to think she was sort of a character and took notes while she talked. So she couldn't see me, you know, just as though I were writing casually. He had seized Anthony's arm and was walking him briskly up Madison Avenue. Where to? Nowhere in particular. Well, then, what's the use, demanded Anthony. They stopped and stared at each other, and Anthony wondered if the cold made his own face as repellent as Dick Caramel's, whose nose was crimson, whose bulging brow was blue, whose yellow unmatched eyes were red and watery at the rims. After a moment they began walking again. Done some good work on my novel. Dick was looking and talking emphatically at the sidewalk, but I have to get out once in a while. He glanced at Anthony apologetically, as though craving encouragement. I have to talk. I guess very few people ever really think. I mean, sit down and ponder and have ideas and a sequence. I do my thinking and writing or conversation. You've got to have a start, sort of, something to defend her contra-Dick, don't you think? Anthony grunted and withdrew his arm gently. I don't mind carrying you, Dick, but with that coat, I mean, continued Richard Caramel gravely, that on paper your first paragraph contains the idea you're going to dam or enlarge on. In conversation you've got your vis-a-vis last statement, but when you simply ponder why your ideas just succeed each other like magic lantern pictures, and each one forces out the last. They passed forty-fifty street and slowed down slightly. Both of them lit cigarettes and blew tremendous clouds of smoke and frosted breath into the air. Let's walk up to the plaza and have an eggnog, suggested Anthony. Do you good? Errol get the rotten nicotine out of your lungs. Come on, I'll let you talk about your book all the way. I don't want to if it bores you. I mean, you needn't do it as a favor. The words tumbled out in haste, and then we tried to keep his face casual and screwed up uncertainly. Anthony was compelled to protest. Bore me? I should say not. Got a cousin, began Dick, but Anthony interrupted by stretching out his arms and breathing forth a low cry of exultation. Good weather, he exclaimed. Isn't it? Makes me feel about ten. I mean, it makes me feel as I should have felt when I was ten. Murderous. Oh, God! One minute it's my world and the next I'm the world's fool. Today it's my world and everything's easy, easy. Even nothing is easy. Got a cousin up at the plaza. Famous girl. Go up and meet her. She lives there the winter, has lately anyway, with her mother and father. Didn't know you had cousins in New York. Her name's Gloria. She's from home, Kansas City. Her mother's a practicing bilfist, and her father's quite dull, but a perfect gentleman. What are they? Literary material? They try to be. All the old man does is tell me he just met the most wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic friend of his, and then he says there is a character for you. Why don't you write him up? Everybody'd be interested in him. Or else he tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and says, Why don't you write a story about that place? That'd be a wonderful setting for a story. How about the girl? Inquired Anthony, casually. Gloria. Gloria what? Gilbert. Oh, you've heard of her. Gloria Gilbert. Goes to dances at colleges. All that sort of thing. I've heard her name. Good looking. Damn detractive. They reached fiftieth street, and turned over toward the avenue. I don't care if her young girl's is a rule, said Anthony, frowning. This was not strictly true. While it seemed to him that the average debutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any girl who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him enormously. Gloria is darn nice, not a brain in her head. Anthony laughed in a one-syllable snort. By that you mean she hasn't a line of literary pattern. No, I don't. Dick, you know what passes as brains in a girl for you, earnest young women who sit with you in a corner and talk earnestly about life, the kind who, when they were sixteen, argued with grave faces as to whether kissing was right or wrong, and whether it was immoral for freshmen to drink beer. Richard Caramel was offended. His scowl crinkled like crushed paper. No, he began, but Anthony interrupted ruthlessly. Oh, yes, kind who just at present sit in corners and confer on the latest Scandinavian Dante available in English translation. Dick turned to him, a curious spalling in his whole countenance. His question was almost an appeal. What's the matter with you and Maury? You talk sometimes as though I were sort of inferior. Anthony was confused, but he was also cold and a little uncomfortable, so he took refuge and attack. I don't think your brains matter, Dick. Of course they matter, exclaimed Dick angrily. What do you mean? Why don't they matter? You might know too much for your pen. I couldn't possibly. I can imagine, insisted Anthony, a man knowing too much for his talent to express, like me. Suppose, for instance, I have more wisdom than you and less talent. It would tend to make me inarticulate. You, on the contrary, have enough water to fill the pail and a big enough pail to hold all the water. I don't follow you at all, complained Dick, at a crestfallen tone. Infinitely dismayed, he seemed to bulge in protest. He was staring intently at Anthony and caroming off a succession of passersby who reproached him with fierce resentful glances. I simply mean that a talent like Wells's could carry the intelligence of a Spencer, but an inferior talent can only be graceful when it's carrying inferior ideas, and the more narrowly you can look at a thing, the more entertaining you can be about it. Dick considered, unable to decide the exact degree of criticism intended by Anthony's remarks. But Anthony, with that facility which seemed so frequently to flow from him, continued, his dark eyes gleaming in his thin face, his chin raised, his voice raised, his whole physical being raised. Say I am proud and sane and wise, an Athenian among Greeks. Well, I might fail where a lesser man would succeed. He could imitate, he could adorn, he could be enthusiastic, he could be hopefully constructive. But this hypothetical me would be too proud to imitate, too sane to be enthusiastic, too sophisticated to be utopian, too Grecian to adorn. Then you don't think the artist works from his intelligence? No, he goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all, every writer writes because it's his mode of living. Don't tell me you like this divine function of the artist business. I'm not accustomed even to refer to myself as an artist. Dick, said Anthony, I want to beg your pardon. Why? For that outburst, I'm honestly sorry I was talking for a fact. Somewhat mollified, Dick rejoined. I've often said you were a Philistine at heart. It was a crackling dusk when they turned in under the white façade of the plaza and tasted slowly the foam and yellow thickness of an egg-dog. Anthony looked at his companion. Richard Caramel's nose and brow were slowly approaching a like pigmentation. The red was leaving the one, the blue deserting the other. Glancing at a mirror, Anthony was glad to find that his own skin had not discoloured. On the contrary, a faint glow had kindled in his cheeks. He fancied that he had never looked so well. Enough for me, said Dick, his tone that of an athlete in training. I want to go up and see the Gilberts. Won't you come? Why, yes. If you don't dedicate me to the parents and dash off in the corner with Dora. Not Dora, Gloria. A clerk announced them over the phone. And ascending to the 10th floor, they followed a winding corridor and knocked at 1088. Dora was answered by a middle-aged lady. Mrs. Gilbert herself. How do you do? She spoke in the conventional American lady-lady language. Well, I'm awfully glad to see you. Hasty interjections by Dick. And then, Mr. Petz? Well, do come in and leave your coat there. She pointed to a chair and changed her inflection to a deprecatory laugh full of minute gasps. This is really lovely, lovely. Why, Richard, you haven't been here for so long. No, no. The latter monosyllables served half as responses, half as periods, to some vague starts from Dick. Well, do sit down and tell me what you've been doing. One crossed and recrossed. One stood and bowed ever so gently. One smiled again and again with helpless stupidity. One wondered if she would ever sit down. At length, one slid thankfully into a chair and settled for a pleasant call. I suppose it's because you've been busy as much as anything else. Smiled Mrs. Gilbert somewhat ambiguously. The, as much as anything else, she used to balance all her more rickety sentences. She had two other ones. At least that's the way I look at it. And pure and simple. These three, alternated, gave each of her remarks an air of being a general reflection on life as though she had calculated all causes and, at length, put her finger on the ultimate one. Richard Caramel's face, Anthony saw, was now quite normal. The brow and cheeks were of a flush color, the nose politely inconspicuous. He had fixed his aunt with the bright yellow eye, giving her that acute and exaggerated attention that young males are accustomed to render to all females who are of no further value. Are you a writer, too, Mr. Patts? Well, perhaps we can all bask in Richard's fame. Gentle laughter led by Mrs. Gilbert. Gloria's out, she said, with an air of laying down an axiom from which she would proceed to derive results. She's dancing somewhere. Gloria goes, goes, goes. I tell her I don't see how she stands it. She dances all afternoon and all night until I think she's going to wear herself to a shadow. Her father is very worried about her. She smiled from one to the other. They both smiled. She was composed, Anthony perceived, of a succession of semi-circles and parabolas, like those figures that gifted folk make on the typewriter. Head, arms, bust, hips, thighs, and ankles were in a broodling tier of roundnesses. Well-ordered and clean she was, with hair of an artificially rich gray, her large face sheltered weather-beaten blue eyes and was adorned with just the faintest white mustache. I always say, she remarked to Anthony, that Richard is an ancient soul. In the tense pause that followed, Anthony considered a pun, something about Dick having been much walked upon. We all have souls of different ages, continued Mrs. Gilbert radiantly. At least that's what I say. Perhaps so, agreed Anthony, with an air of quickening to a hopeful idea. The voice bubbled on. Gloria has a very young soul, irresponsible as much as anything else. She has no sense of responsibility. She's sparkling on Catherine, said Richard pleasantly. A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty. Well, confessed Mrs. Gilbert, all I know is that she goes and goes and goes. The number of goings to Gloria's discredit was lost in the rattle of the doorknob as it turned to admit Mr. Gilbert. He was a short man with a mustache resting like a small white cloud beneath his undistinguished nose. He had reached the stage where his value as a social creature was a black and imponderable negative. His ideas were the popular delusions of twenty years before. His mind steered a wobbly and anemic course in the wake of the Daily Newspaper editorials. After graduating from a small but terrifying western university, he had entered the celluloid business, and as this required only the minute measure of intelligence he brought to it, he did well for several years. In fact, until about 1911, when he began exchanging contracts for vague agreements with the moving picture industry, the moving picture industry had decided about 1912 to gobble him up, and at this time he was, so to speak, delicately balanced on its tongue. Meanwhile, he was supervising manager of the associated midwestern film materials company, spending six months of each year in New York and the remainder in Kansas City and St. Louis. He felt credulously that there was a good thing coming to him, and his wife thought so, and his daughter thought so, too. He disapproved of Gloria. She stayed out late. She never ate her meals. She was always in a mix-up. He had irritated her once, and she had used towards him words that he had not thought were part of her vocabulary. His wife was easier. After fifteen years of incessant guerrilla warfare, he had conquered her. It was a war of muddled optimism against organized dullness. And something in the number of yeses, with which he could poison a conversation, had won him the victory. Yes, yes, yes, yes, he would say. Yes, yes, yes, yes, let me see. That was the summer of, let me see. Ninety-one or ninety-two? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Fifteen years of yeses had beaten Mrs. Gilbert. Fifteen further years of that incessant, unaffirmative affirmative, accompanied by the perpetual flicking of ash mushrooms from thirty-two thousand cigars, had broken her. To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married life, which is more complete, more irrevocable than the first. She listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance. Actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage. She introduced him to Anthony. This is Mr. Patts, she said. The young man and the old touched flush. Mr. Gilbert's hand was soft, worn away to the pulpy semblance of a squeezed grapefruit. Then husband and wife exchanged greetings. He told her it had grown colder out. He said he had walked down to a newsstand on forty-fourth Street for a Kansas City paper. He had intended to ride back in the bus, but he had found it too cold. Yes, yes, yes, yes, too cold. Mrs. Gilbert added flavor to his adventure by being impressed with his courage in braving the harsh air. Well, you are spunky, she exclaimed admiringly. You are spunky. I wouldn't have gone out for anything. Mr. Gilbert, with true masculine impassivity, disregarded the awe he had excited in his wife. He turned to the two young men and triumphantly routed them on the subject of the weather. Richard Caramel was called on to remember the month of November and Kansas. No sooner had the theme been pushed toward him, however, than it was violently fished back to be lingered over, pawed over, elongated, and generally devitalized by its sponsor. The immemorial thesis that the days somewhere were warm, but the nights very pleasant, was successfully propounded, and they decided the exact distance on an obscure railroad between two points that Dick had inadvertently mentioned. Anthony fixed Mr. Gilbert with a steady stare and went into a trance through which, after a moment, Mrs. Gilbert's smiling voice penetrated. It seems as though the cold were damper here. It seems to eat into my bones. As this remark, adequately yes, had been on the tip of Mr. Gilbert's tongue, he could not be blamed for rather abruptly changing the subject. Where's Gloria? She ought to be here any minute. Have you met my daughter, Mr....? Haven't had the pleasure. I've heard Dick speak of her often. She and Richard are cousins. Yes? Anthony smiled with some effort. He was not used to the society of his seniors, and his mouth was stiff from superfluous cheerfulness. It was such a pleasant thought about Gloria and Dick being cousins. He managed within the next minute to throw an agonized glance at his friend. Richard Caramel was afraid they'd have to tattle off. Mrs. Gilbert was tremendously sorry. Mr. Gilbert thought it was too bad. Mrs. Gilbert had a further idea. Something about being glad they'd come, anyhow, even if they'd only seen an old lady way too old to flirt with them. Anthony and Dick evidently considered this a sly sally, for they laughed one bar in three-four time. Would they come again soon? Oh, yes. Gloria would be awfully sorry. Goodbye. Goodbye. Smiles. Smiles. Bang! Two disconsolate young men walking down the tenth-floor quarter of the plaza in the direction of the elevator, a lady's legs. Behind more ennobles attractive indolence, his irrelevance and his easy mockery lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose. His intention, as he stated it in college, had been to use three years in travel, three years in utter leisure, and then to become immensely rich as quickly as possible. His three years of travel were over. He had accomplished the globe with an intensity and curiosity that, in any one else, would have seemed pedantic, without redeeming spontaneity, almost the self-editing of a human beddicker. But in this case it assumed an air of mysterious purpose and significant design, as though more ennobles were some predestined antichrist, urged by a preordination to go everywhere there was to go along the earth, and to see all the billions of humans who bred and wept and slew each other here and there upon it. Back in America he was sallying into the search for amusement with the same consistent absorption. He who had never taken more than a few cocktails or a pint of wine it is sitting, taught himself to drink as he would have taught himself Greek. Like Greek it would be the gateway to a wealth of new traditions, new psychic states, new reactions in joy or misery. His habits were a matter for esoteric speculation. He had three rooms in a bachelor apartment on forty-fourth Street, but he was seldom to be found there. The telephone girl had received the most positive instructions that no one should even have his ear without first giving a name to be passed upon. She had a list of half a dozen people to whom he was never at home, and of the same number to whom he was always at home. The first on the latter list were Anthony Patch and Richard Caramel. Maury's mother lived with her married son in Philadelphia, and there Maury went usually for the weekends. So one Saturday night when Anthony, prowling the chilly streets in a fit of utter boredom, dropped in at the molten arms, he was overjoyed to find that Mr. Noble was at home. His spirit soared faster than the flying elevator. This was so good, so extremely good, to be about to talk to Maury, who would be equally happy at seeing him. They would look at each other with a deep affection just behind their eyes, which both would conceal beneath some attenuated railery. Had it been summer they would have gone out together and indolently sip two long, tall columns, as they wilted their collars, and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall buildings, and December just up the street, so better far and evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of bush-mills, or a thimbleful of Maury's grand-marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and cat-like, in his favorite chair. There he was! The room closed about Anthony, warmed him. The glow of that strong persuasive mind, that temperament, almost oriental in its outward impassivity, warmed Anthony's restless soul, and brought him a peace that could be likened only to the peace a stupid woman gives. One must understand all, else one must take all for granted. Maury filled the room, tiger-like, god-like. The winds outside were stilled, the brass candlesticks on the mantle glowed like tapers before an altar. What keeps you here today? Anthony spread himself over a yielding sofa, and made an elbow rest among the pillows. He spent here an hour, tea-dance, and I stayed so late I missed my train to Philadelphia. Strange to say so long, commented Anthony curiously. Rather, what'd you do? Geraldine, little usher at Keith's, I told you about her. Oh! Paid me a call about three, and stayed till five. Peque your little soul, she gets me. She's so utterly stupid. Maury was silent. She's it may seem, continued Anthony, so far as I'm concerned, and even so far as I know Geraldine is a paragon of virtue. He had known her a month, a girl of nondescript and nomadic habits. Someone had casually passed her on to Anthony, who considered her amusing and rather liked the chaste and fairy-like kisses she had given him on the third night of their acquaintance, when they had driven in a taxi through the park. She had a vague family, a shadowy aunt and uncle who shared with her an apartment in the labyrinthine hundreds. She was company, familiar and faintly intimate and restful. Further than that, he did not care to experiment, not from any moral compunction, but from a dread of allowing any entanglement to disturb what he felt was the growing serenity of his life. She has two stunts, he informed Maury. One of them is to get her hair over her eyes some way and then blow it out, and the other is to say, you crazy! Someone makes a remark that's over her head. It fascinates me. I sit there hour after hour, completely intrigued by the maniacal symptoms she finds in my imagination. Maury stirred in his chair and spoke. Remarkable that a person can comprehend so little and yet live in such a complex civilization. A woman like that actually takes the whole universe in the most matter-of-fact way. From the influence of Rousseau to the bearing of the tariff rates on her dinner, the whole phenomenon is utterly strange to her. She'd just been carried along from an age of spearheads and plunked down here with the equipment of an archer for going into a pistol-duel. You could sweep away the entire crust of history, and she'd never know the difference. I wish our Richard would write about her. Anthony, surely you don't think she's worth writing about? As much as anybody, he answered, yawning. You know, I was thinking today that I have a great confidence in Dick, so long as he sticks to people and not to ideas, and as long as his inspirations come from life and not from art, and always granting a normal growth, I believe he'll be a big man. I should think the appearance of the Black Notebook would prove that he's going to life. Anthony raised himself on his elbow and answered eagerly. He tries to go to life. So does every author except the very worst, but after all most of them live on predigested food. The incident or character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in terms of the last book he read. For instance, suppose he meets a sea captain and thinks he's an original character. The truth is that he sees the resemblance between the sea captain and the last sea captain Dana created, or whoever creates sea captains, and therefore he knows how to set the sea captain on paper. Dick, of course, can set down any consciously picturesque character-like character, but could he accurately transcribe his own sister? Then they were off for half an hour on literature. A classic, suggested Anthony, is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation, then it's safe, like a style and architecture, or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion. After a time the subject temporarily lost its tang. The interest of the two young men was not particularly technical. They were in love with generalities. Anthony had recently discovered Samuel Butler and the brisk aphorisms and the notebook seemed to him the quintessence of criticism. Morey, his whole mind so thoroughly mellowed by the very hardness of his scheme of life, seemed inevitably the wiser of the two, yet in the actual stuff of their intelligence they were not, it seemed, fundamentally different. They drifted from letters to the curiosities of each other's day. Whose tea was it? People named Abercrombie. Why'd you stay late? Did a luscious debutante? Yes. Did you really? Anthony's voice lifted in surprise. Not a debutante, exactly. Said she came out two winters ago in Kansas City. Sort of a leftover? No. Answered Morey with some amusement. I think that's the last thing I'd say about her. She seemed, well, somehow the youngest person there. Not too young to make you miss a train. Young enough. Beautiful child. Anthony chuckled in his one-syllable snort. Oh, Morey, you're in your second childhood. What do you mean by beautiful? Morey gazed helplessly into space. Well, I can't describe her exactly, except to say that she was beautiful. She was tremendously alive. She was eating gumdrops. What? It was a sort of attenuated vice. She's a nervous kind, said she always ate gumdrops at teas because she had to stand around so long in one place. Did you talk about Berkson, Bilfism, whether the one step is immoral? Morey was unruffled. His fur seemed to run always. As a matter of fact, we did talk on Bilfism. Seems her mother's a Bilfist. Mostly though, we talked about legs. Anthony rocked in glee. My God! Whose legs? Hers. She talked a lot about hers. As though they were a sort of choice bric-a-brac. She roused a great desire to see them. What is she? A dancer? Well, I found out she was a cousin of Dick's. Anthony sat upright so suddenly that the pillow he released stood on end like a live thing and dove to the floor. Names Gloria Gilbert? He cried. Yes. Isn't she remarkable? I'm sure I don't know, but for sheer dullness her father, well, interrupted Morey with implacable conviction. Her family may be as sad as professional mourners, but I'm inclined to think that she is a quite authentic and original character. The utter signs of the cut-and-dry deal from girl and all that, but different, very emphatically different. Go on, go on, urged Anthony. Soon as Dick told me she didn't have a brain in her head, I knew she must be pretty good. Did he say that? Swore to it, said Anthony, with another snorting laugh. Well, what he means by brains in a woman is, I know, interrupted Anthony eagerly, he means a smattering of literary misinformation. That's it. The kind who believes that the annual moral letdown of the country is a very good thing, or the kind who believes it's a very ominous thing. Either pincenets or postures. Well, this girl talked about legs. She talked about skin, too, her own skin, always her own. She told me the sort of tan she'd like to get in the summer, and how closely she usually approximated it. You sat and raptured by her low alto? By her low alto? No, by tan. I began thinking about tan. I began to think what color I turned when I made my last exposure about two years ago. I did used to get a pretty good tan. I used to get a sort of bronze, if I remember rightly. Anthony retired into the cushions, shaken with laughter. She's got you going. Oh, Maury. Maury the Connecticut lifesaver, the human nutmeg, extra, aerosolopes with Coast Guard because of his luscious pigmentation, afterward found to be Tasmanian strain in his family. Maury sighed. Rising, he walked to the window and raised the shade. Snowing hard. Anthony, still laughing quietly to himself, made no answer. Another winter. Maury's voice from the window was almost a whisper. We're growing old, Anthony. I'm twenty-seven, by God, three years to thirty, and then I'm what an undergraduate calls a middle-aged man. Anthony was silent for a moment. You are old, Maury, he agreed at length. The first signs of a very disillute and wobbly senescence. You have spent the afternoon talking about tan in the ladies' legs. Maury pulled down the shade with a sudden harsh snap. Idiot! he cried. That's from you. Here I sit, young Anthony, as I'll sit for a generation or more and watch such gay souls as you and Dick and Gloria Gilbert go past me, dancing and singing and loving and hating one another and being moved, being eternally moved. And I am moved only by my lack of emotion. I shall sit, and the snow will come, oh, for a caramel to take notes. And another winter, and I shall be thirty, and you and Dick and Gloria will go on being eternally moved and dancing by me and singing. But after you've all gone I'll be saying things for new dicks to write down, and listening to the disillusions and cynicism and emotions of new Anthony's, yes, and talking to new Gloria's about the tans and summers yet to come. The firelight flurried up on the hearth. Maury left the window, stirred the blaze with a poker, and dropped a log upon the and irons. Then he sat back in his chair, and the remnants of his voice faded in the new fire that spit red and yellow along the bark. After all, Anthony, it's you who are very romantic and young. It's you who are infinitely more susceptible and afraid of your calm being broken. It's me who tries again and again to be moved. Let myself go a thousand times, and I'm always me. Nothing quite stirs me. Yet, he murmured, after another long pause, there was something about that little girl with her absurd tan that was eternally old, like me. End of Book 1, Chapter 2, Part 1 of 2. TURBULENCE Anthony turned over sleepily in his bed, greeting a patch of cold sun on his counterpane, criss-crossed with the shadows of the leaded window. The room was full of mourning. The carved chest in the corner, the ancient and inscrutable wardrobe, stood about the room like dark symbols of the obliviousness of matter. Only the rug was beckoning and perishable to his perishable feet. When bounds, horribly inappropriate in his soft collar, was of stuff as fading as the gods of frozen breath he uttered. He was close to the bed, his hand still lowered, where he had been jerking at the upper blanket, his dark brown eyes fixed imperturbably upon his master. Bows, muttered the drowsy god. That chew, Bows? It's I, sir. Anthony moved his head, forced his eyes wide, and blinked triumphantly. Yes, sir? Can you get off? Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, oh, God! Anthony yawned insufferably, and the contents of his brain seemed to fall together in a dense hash. He made a fresh start. Can you come around about four and serve some tea and sandwiches or something? Yes, sir. Anthony considered it with chilling lack of inspiration. Some sandwiches, he repeated helplessly. Oh, some cheese sandwiches and jelly ones and chicken and olive, I guess. Never mind breakfast. The strain of invention was too much. He shut his eyes warily, led his head roll to rest inertly, and quickly relaxed what he had regained of muscular control. Out of a crevice of his mind crept the vague but inevitable specter of the night before. But it proved in this case to be nothing but a seemingly interminable conversation with Richard Caramel, who had called on him at midnight. They had drunk four bottles of beer and munched dry crusts of bread while Anthony had listened to a reading of the first part of The Demon Lover. Came a voice now after many hours. Anthony disregarded it as sleep closed over him, folded down upon him, crept into the byways of his mind. Suddenly he was awake, saying, What? For how many, sir? It was still bound, standing patient and motionless at the foot of the bed, bound who divided his matter among three gentlemen. How many what? I think, sir, I'd better know how many are coming. I'll have to plan for the sandwiches, sir. Two, muttered Anthony huskily, Lady and a gentleman. Bound said, Thank you, sir, and moved away, bearing with him his humiliating, reproachful soft collar, reproachful to each of the three gentlemen who only demanded of him a third. After a long time Anthony arose and drew an opalescent dressing gown of brown and blue over his slim, pleasant figure. With a last yawn he went into the bathroom, and turning on the dresser light, the bathroom had no outside exposure, he contemplated himself in the mirror with some interest. A wretched apparition, he thought, he usually thought so in the morning, sleep made his face unnaturally pale. He lit a cigarette and glanced through several letters in the morning tribune. An hour later, shaven and dressed, he was sitting at his desk looking at a small piece of paper he had taken out of his wallet. It was scrawled with semi-legible memoranda. See Mr. Howland at five, get haircut, see about Rivers' bill, go bookstore. And under the last, cash in bank, six hundred and ninety dollars, crossed out, six hundred and twelve dollars, crossed out, six hundred and seven dollars. Finally down at the bottom and in a hurried scrawl, Dick and Gloria Gilbert for tea. This last item brought him obvious satisfaction. His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained messozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a place should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the tea-cups and the gathering stillness of the uneaten sandwiches. There was a growing lack of color in Anthony's days. He felt it constantly, and sometimes traced it to a talk he had had, with Mori Noble a month before. That anything so ingenuous, so priggish, as a sense of waste should oppress him, was absurd. But there was no denying the fact that some unwelcome survival of a fetish had drawn him three weeks before down to the public library, where, by the token of Richard Caramel's card, he had drawn out half a dozen books on the Italian Renaissance. That these books were still pile on his desk in the original order of carriage, that they were daily increasing his liabilities by twelve cents, was no mitigation of their testimony. They were cloth and Morocco witnesses to the fact of his defection. Anthony had had several hours of acute and startling panic. In justification of his manner of living, there was first, of course, the meaninglessness of life. As aides and ministers, pages and squires, butlers and lackeys, to this great con, there were a thousand books glowing on his shelves. There was his apartment, and all the money that was to be his when the old man up the river should choke on his last morality. From a world fraught with the menace of debutants, and the stupidity of many Geraldines, he was thankfully delivered, rather should he emulate the feline immobility of Mori, and wear proudly the cumulative wisdom of the numbered generations. Over and against these things was something which his brain persistently analyzed and dealt with as a tiresome complex, but which, though logically disposed of and bravely trampled underfoot, had sent him out through the soft slush of late November to a library which had none of the books he most wanted. It is fair to analyze Anthony as far as he could analyze himself. Further than that, it is, of course, presumption. He found in himself a growing horror and loneliness. The idea of eating alone frightened him. In preference he dined often with men he detested. Travel which had once charmed him seemed at length unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow. If I am essentially weak, he thought, I need work to do, work to do. It worried him to think that he was, after all, a facile mediocrity, with neither the poise of Mori nor the enthusiasm of Dick. It seemed a tragedy to want nothing, and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashes what it was. Some path of hope to lead him toward what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age. After cocktails and luncheon at the university club Anthony felt better. He had run into two men from his class at Harvard, and in contrast to the gray heaviness of their conversation his life assumed color. Both of them were married, one spent his coffee time in sketching an extra-nuptial adventure to the blend in appreciative smiles of the other. Both of them, he thought, were Mr. Gilbert's and Embryo, the number of their yeses would have to be quadrupled, their natures crabbed by twenty years, then they would be no more than obsolete and broken machines, pseudo-wise and valueless, nursed to an utter senility by the women they had broken. He was more than that, as he paced along carpet in the lounge after dinner, pausing at the window to look into the harried street. He was Anthony Patch, brilliant, magnetic, the air of many years and many men. This was his world now, and that last strong irony he craved lay in the often. With a stray boyishness he saw himself a power upon the earth, with his grandfather's money he might build his own pedestal and be a tally-rand, a Lord verilam. The clarity of his mind, its sophistication, its versatile intelligence, all of their maturity and dominated by some purpose yet to be born would find him work to do. On this minor his dream faded, work to do. He tried to imagine himself in Congress, rooting around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and poor-signed brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rhodogravure sections of the Sunday newspapers. Those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to the nation the ideas of high school seniors, little men with copy-book ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into the lustrous and unromantic heaven of a government by the people, and the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were content to lead this choir of white ties and wire-collar buttons in a discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as proof of vice. And continued cheers for God, the Constitution, and the Rocky Mountains. Lord verilam, tally-rand. Back in his apartment the greyness returned. His cocktails had died, making him sleepy, somewhat befogged, and inclined to be surly. Lord verilam, he, the very thought, was bitter. Anthony Patch, with no record of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with truth when it was given him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and, meanwhile, regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste, and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle. The buzzer rang at the door. Anthony sprang up and lifted the tube to his ear. It was Richard Caramel's voice, stilted in facetious. Announcing Miss Gloria Gilbert. The beautiful lady. How do you do, he said, smiling and holding the door ajar. Dick bowed. Gloria, this is Anthony. Well, she cried, holding out a little gloved hand. Under her fur coat her dress was alice blue, with white lace crinkled stiffly about her throat. Let me take your things. Anthony stretched out his arms, and the brown mass of fur tumbled into them. Thanks. What do you think of her, Anthony? Richard Caramel demanded barbarously. Isn't she beautiful? Well, cried the girl defiantly, with all unmoved. She was dazzling, alight. It was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance. Her hair, full of a heavenly glamour, was gay against the winter colour of the room. Anthony moved about, magician-like, turning the mushroom lamp into an orange glory. The stirred fire burnished the copper and irons on the hearth. I'm a solid block of ice, murmured Gloria casually, glancing around with eyes whose irises were of the most delicate and transparent bluish white. What a slick fire! We found a place where you could stand on an iron bar-grating, sort of, and it blew warm air up at you, but Dick wouldn't wait there with me. I told him to go on alone and let me be happy. Conventional enough this. She seemed talking for her own pleasure, without effort. Anthony, sitting at one end of the sofa, examined her profile against the foreground of the lamp. The exquisite regularity of nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely classical, almost cold, but the glow of her hair and cheeks at once flushed and fragile made her the most living person he had ever seen. Think you've got the best name I've heard, she was saying, still apparently to herself. Her glance rested on him a moment, and then flitted past him, to the Italian bracket lamps clinging like luminous yellow turtles at intervals along the walls, to the books row upon row, then to her cousin on the other side. Anthony patch, only you ought to look sort of like a horse, with the long, narrow face, and you ought to be in tatters. That's all the patch part, though. How should Anthony look? You look like Anthony, she assured him seriously. He thought, she had scarcely seen him. Rather majestic she continued, and solemn. Anthony indulged in a disconcerted smile. Only I like alliterative names, she went on, all except mine, mine's too flamboyant. I used to know two girls named Jinx, though, and just think if they'd been named anything except what they were named, Judy Jinx and Jerry Jinx. Cute, what? Don't you think? Her childish mouth was parted, awaiting a rejoinder. Everybody in the next generation, suggested Dick, will be named Peter or Barbara, because at present all the precant literary characters are named Peter or Barbara. Anthony continued the prophecy. Of course Gladys and Eleanor, having graced the last generation of heroines, and being at present in their social prime, will be passed on to the next generation of shopgirls. Displacing Ella and Stella, interrupted Dick, and Pearl and Jewel, Gloria added cordially, and Earl and Elmer and Minnie. And then I'll come along, remarked Dick, and picking up the obsolete name Jewel, I'll attach it to some quaint and attractive character, and it'll start its career all over again. Her voice took up the thread of subject, and wove along with faintly upturning, half-humorous intonations for sentence ends, as though defying interruption, and intervals of shadowy laughter. Dick had told her that Anthony's man was named Bounds. She thought that was wonderful. Dick had made some sad pun about Bounds doing patchwork. But if there was one thing worse than a pun, she said, it was a person who, as the inevitable comeback to a pun, gave the perpetrator a mock reproachful look. Where are you from? inquired Anthony. He knew, but Beauty had rendered him thoughtless. Kansas City, Missouri. They put her out the same time they barred cigarettes. Did they bar cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather. He's a reformer or something, isn't he? I blush for him. So do I, she confessed. I detest reformers, especially the sort who tried to reform me. Are there many of those? Dozens. It's, oh, Gloria, if you smoke so many cigarettes, you lose your pretty compulsion. And, oh, Gloria, why don't you marry and settle down? Anthony agreed emphatically while he wondered who had had the chimerity to speak thus to such a personage. And then she continued, there are all the subtle reformers who tell you the wild stories they've heard about you and how they've been sticking up for you. He saw, at length, that her eyes were gray, very level and cool, and when they rested on him he understood what Maury had meant by saying she was very young and very old. She talked always about herself as a very charming child might talk, and her comments on her tastes and distaste were unaffected and spontaneous. I must confess, said Anthony gravely, that even I've heard one thing about you. Alert at once, she sat up straight. Those eyes, with the grayness and eternity of a cliff of soft granite, caught his. Tell me, I'll believe it, I always believe anything anyone tells me about myself, don't you? Anthony agreed the two men in unison. Well, tell me. I'm not sure that I ought to, teased Anthony, smiling unwillingly. She was so obviously interested in a state of almost laughable self-absorption. He means your nickname, said her cousin. What name, inquired Anthony, politely puzzled. Instantly she was shy, then she laughed, rolled back against the cushions, and turned her eyes up as she spoke. Coast to coast, Gloria. Her voice was full of laughter, laughter undefined as the varying shadows playing between fire and lamp upon her hair. Oh, Lord. Still, Anthony was puzzled. What do you mean? Me, I mean. That's what some silly boys coined for me. Don't you see, Anthony, explained Dick, traveler of a nationwide notoriety and all that. Isn't that what you've heard? She's been called that for years, since she was seventeen. Anthony's eyes became sad and humorous. Who's this female Methuselah you've brought in here, a caramel? She disregarded this, possibly rather resented it, for she switched back to the main topic. What have you heard of me? Something about your physique. Oh, she said, coolly disappointed. That all? Your tan. My tan? She was puzzled. Her hand rose to her throat, rested there an instant, as though the fingers were feeling variants of color. Do you remember Maury Noble, man you met about a month ago? You made a great impression. She thought a moment. I remember, but he didn't call me up. He was afraid to, I don't doubt. It was black-dark without now, and Anthony wondered that his apartment had ever seemed gray. So warm and friendly were the books and pictures on the walls, and the good bounds offering tea from a respectful shadow, and the three nice people giving out waves of interest and laughter back and forth across the happy fire. Disatisfaction. On Thursday afternoon Gloria and Anthony had tea together in the grill-room at the plaza. Her fur-trimmed suit was gray, because with gray you have to wear a lot of paint, she explained, and a small toque sat rakeishly on her head, allowing yellow ripples of hair to wave out in jaunty glory. In the higher light it seemed to Anthony that her personality was infinitely softer. She seemed so young, scarcely eighteen. Her form under the tight sheath, known then as a hobble-skirt, was amazingly supple and slender, and her hands neither artistic nor stubby, were small as a child's hand should be. As they entered the orchestra were sounding the preliminary whimpers to a mecsis, a tune full of castanets and facile, faintly languorous violin harmonies, appropriate to the crowded winter grill teeming with an excited college crowd, high-spirited at the approach of the holidays. Carefully, Gloria considered several locations, and rather to Anthony's annoyance paraded him circuitously to a table for two at the far side of the room. Reaching it she again considered, would she sit on the right or on the left? Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naïve was her every gesture. She took all the things of life for hers to choose from in a portion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter. Abstractedly she watched the dancers for a few moments, commenting murmurously as a couple eddied near. There's a pretty girl in blue, and as Anthony looked obediently, there, no, behind you, there. Yes, he agreed helplessly. You didn't see her. I'd rather look at you. I know, but she was pretty, except that she had big ankles. Was she? I mean, did she? He said indifferently. A girl's salutation came from a couple dancing close to them. Hello, Gloria. Oh, Gloria. Hello there. Who's that? He demanded. I don't know, somebody. She caught sight of another face. Hello, Muriel. Then to Anthony. There's Muriel Kane. Now, I think she's attractive, except not very. Anthony chuckled appreciatively. Attractive, except not very, he repeated. She smiled and was interested immediately. Why is that funny? Her tone was pathetically intent. It just was. Do you want to dance? Do you? Sort of, but let's sit, she decided. And talk about you? You love to talk about you, don't you? Yes, caught in a vanity, she laughed. I imagine your autobiography would be a classic. Dick says I haven't got one. Dick, he exclaimed, what does he know about you? Nothing, but he says the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss that counts and ends when her last child is laid in her arms. He's talking from his book. He says unloved women have no biographies, they have histories. Anthony laughed again. Surely you don't claim to be unloved. Well, I suppose not. Then why haven't you a biography? Haven't you ever had a kiss that counted? As the words left his lips, he drew in his breath sharply as though to suck them back. This baby. I don't know what you mean counts, she objected. I wish you'd tell me how old you are. 22, she said, meeting his eyes gravely. How old did you think? About 18. I'm going to start being that. I don't like being 22. I hate it more than anything in the world. Being 22? No, getting old and everything, getting married. Don't you ever want to marry? I don't want to have responsibility and a lot of children to take care of. Evidently she did not doubt that on her lips all things were good. He waited rather breathlessly for her next remark, expecting it to follow up her last. She was smiling, without amusement, but pleasantly. And after an interval, half a dozen words fell into the space between them. I wish I had some gumdrops. You shall. He beckoned to a waiter and sent him to the cigar counter. Do you mind? I love gumdrops. Everybody kids me about it because I'm always whacking away at one whenever my daddy's not around. Not at all. Who are all these children? He asked suddenly. Do you know them all? What, no. But they're from, oh, from everywhere, I suppose. Don't you ever come here? Very seldom. I don't care particularly for nice girls. Immediately he had her attention. She turned a definite shoulder to the dancers, relaxed in her chair, and demanded, what do you do with yourself? Thanks to a cocktail, Anthony welcomed the question. In a mood to talk, he wanted, moreover, to impress this girl whose interest seems so tantalizingly elusive. She stopped to browse in unexpected pastures, hurried quickly over the inobviously obvious. He wanted to pose. He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself. I do nothing, he began, realizing simultaneously that his words were to lack the debonair grace he craved for them. I do nothing for there's nothing I can do that's worth doing. Well, he had neither surprised her nor even held her, yet she had certainly understood him if indeed he said odd worth understanding. Don't you approve of lazy men? She nodded. I suppose so if they're gracefully lazy. Is that possible for an American? Why not? He demanded, discomforted. But her mind had left the subject and wandered up 10 floors. My daddy's mad at me. She observed dispassionately. Why? But I want to know just why it's impossible for an American to be gracefully idle. His words gathered conviction. It astonishes me. It, it, I don't understand why people think that every young man ought to go downtown and work 10 hours a day for the best 20 years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work. He broke off. She washed him inscritably. He waited for her to agree or disagree, but she did neither. Don't you ever form judgments on things? He asked with some exasperation. She shook her head and her eyes wandered back to the dancers as she answered. I don't know. I don't know anything about what you should do or what anybody should do. She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible. Well, he admitted apologetically. Neither do I, of course, but I just think of people, she continued, whether they seem right where they are and fit into the picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should. In fact, it always astonishes me when anybody does anything. You don't want to do anything? I want to sleep. For a second he was startled, almost as though she had meant this literally. Sleep? Sort of. I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things because that makes me feel comfortable and safe and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all because they can be graceful and compenetable for me, but I never want to change people or get excited over them. You're a quite little determinist, laughed Anthony. It's your world, isn't it? Well, she said, with a quick upward glance, isn't it? As long as I'm young. She had paused slightly before the last word and Anthony suspected that she had intended to say beautiful. It was undeniably what she had intended. Her eyes brightened and he waited for her to enlarge on the theme. He had drawn her out at any rate. He bent forward slightly to catch the words. But, let's dance, was all she said. Admiration. That winter afternoon at the plaza was the first of a succession of dates Anthony made with her and the blurred and stimulating days before Christmas. Invariably, she was busy. What particular strata of the city's social life claimed her, he was a long time finding out. It seemed to matter very little. She attended the semi-public charity dances at the big hotels. He saw her several times at dinner parties in Sherry's and once, as he waited for her to dress, Mrs. Gilbert, apropos of her daughter's habit of going, rattled off an amazing holiday program that included half a dozen dances to which Anthony had received cards. He made engagements with her several times for lunch and tea. The former were hurried and, to him at least, rather unsatisfactory occasions, for she was sleepy-eyed and casual, incapable of concentrating upon anything or of giving consecutive attention to his remarks. When after two of these sallow meals he accused her of tendering him the skin and bones of the day, she laughed and gave him a tea time three days off. This was infinitely more satisfactory. One Sunday afternoon, just before Christmas, he called up and found her in the lull directly after some important but mysterious quarrel. She informed him in a tone of mingled wrath and amusement that she had sent a man out of her apartment. Here Anthony speculated violently and that the man had been giving a little dinner for her that very night and that, of course, she wasn't going, so Anthony took her to supper. "'Let's go to something,' she proposed as I went down in the elevator. "'I want to see a show, don't you?' "'Inquiry at the hotel ticket desk "'disclosed only two Sunday night concerts. "'They're always the same,' she complained unhappily, "'same old Yiddish comedians. "'Oh, let's go somewhere.' "'To conceal a guilty suspicion "'that he should have arranged a performance "'of some kind for her approval, "'Anthony affected a knowing cheerfulness. "'We'll go to a good cabaret. "'I've seen everyone in town. "'Well, we'll find a new one.' She was in wretched humour, that was evident. Her gray eyes were granite now, indeed. When she wasn't speaking, she stared straight in front of her as if it's some distasteful abstraction in the lobby. "'Well, come on then.' He followed her, a graceful girl, even in her enveloping fur, out to a taxi cab, and, with an air of having a definite place in mind, instructed the driver to go over to Broadway and then turn south. He made several casual attempts at conversation, but as she adopted an impenetrable armour of silence and answered him in sentences as morose as the cold darkness of the taxi cab, he gave up and, assuming a like mood, fell into a dim gloom. A dozen blocks down Broadway, Anthony's eyes were caught by a large and unfamiliar electric sign, spelling Marathon and Gloria's yellow script, adorned with electrical leaves and flowers that alternately vanished and beamed upon the wet and glistening street. He leaned and rapped on the taxi window and in a moment was receiving information from a coloured doorman. Yes, this was a cabaret, fine cabaret, best show in the city. Shall we try it? With a sigh, Gloria tossed her cigarette out the open door and prepared to follow it. Then they had passed under the screaming sign, under the wide portal and up by a stuffy elevator into this unsung palace of pleasure. The gay habitats of the very rich and the very poor, the very dashing and the very criminal, not to mention the lately exploited very Bohemian, are made known to the odd high school girls of Augusta, Georgia and Red Wing, Minnesota, not only through the pictured and entrancing spreads of the Sunday theatrical supplements, but through the shocked and alarmful eyes of Mr. Rupert Hughes and other chroniclers of the mad pace of America. But the excursions of Harlem onto Broadway, the deviltries of the dull and the revelries of the respectable are a matter of esoteric knowledge only to the participants themselves. A tip circulates and in the place knowingly mentioned, gather the lower moral classes on Saturday and Sunday nights, the little troubled men who are pictured in the comics as the consumer or the public. They have made sure that the place has three qualifications, it is cheap, it imitates with a sort of shoddy and mechanical wistfulness, the glittering antics of the great cafes in the theater district, and this above all important, it is a place where they can take a nice girl, which means of course, that everyone has become equally harmless, timid and uninteresting through lack of money and imagination. There on Sunday nights gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid, overworked people with hyphenated occupations, bookkeepers, ticket sellers, office managers, salesmen, and most of all, clerks, clerks of the express, of the mail, of the grocery, of the brokerage, of the bank. With them are their giggling, over-gestured, pathetically pretentious women who grow fat with them, bear them too many babies, and float helpless and uncontent in a colorless sea of drudgery and broken hopes. They name these brumagem cabarets after Pullman cars, the marathon, not for them, the salacious similes borrowed from the cafes of Paris, this is where their docile patrons bring their nice women, whose starved fancies are only too willing to believe that the scene is comparatively gay and joyous, even faintly immoral. This is life, who cares for the morrow? Abandoned people, Anthony and Gloria, seated, looked about them. At the next table, a party of four were in process of being joined by a party of three, two men and a girl, who were evidently late, and the manner of the girl was a study in national sociology. She was meeting some new men, and she was pretending desperately. By gesture she was pretending, and by words, and by the scarcely perceptible motionings of her eyelids, that she belonged to a class a little superior to the class with which she now had to do, that a while ago she had been, and presently would again be, in a higher, rarer air. She was almost painfully refined, she wore a last year's hat covered in violets, no more yearningly pretentious, and palpably artificial than herself. Fascinated, Anthony and Gloria watched the girl sit down and radiate the impression that she was only condescendingly present. For me, her eyes said, this is practically a slumming expedition to be cloaked with belittling laughter and semi-apologetics. And the other women passionately poured out the impression that though they were in the crowd, they were not of it. This was not the sort of place to which they were accustomed. They had dropped in because it was nearby and convenient. Every party in the restaurant poured out that impression. Who knew? They were forever changing class, all of them, the women often marrying above their opportunities, the men striking suddenly a magnificent opulence, a sufficiently preposterous advertising scheme, a celestialized ice cream cone. Meanwhile, they met here to eat, closing their eyes to the economy displayed an infrequent changing of the table cloths in the casualness of the cabaret performers, most of all, in the colloquial carelessness and familiarity of the waiters. One was sure that these waiters were not impressed by their patrons. One expected that presently they would sit at the tables. Do you object to this? Inquired Anthony. Gloria's face warmed and for the first time that evening she smiled. I love it, she said frankly. It was impossible to doubt her. Her gray eyes roved hair in there, drowsing, idle or alert, on each group, passing to the next with unconcealed enjoyment, and to Anthony were made plain the different values of her profile, the wonderfully alive expressions of her mouth, and the authentic distinction of face and form and manner that made her like a single flower amidst a collection of cheap brick-a-brack. At her happiness, a gorgeous sentiment weld to his eyes, choked him up, set his nerves a tingle and filled his throat with husky and vibrant emotion. There was a hush upon the room. The careless violins and saxophones, the shrill rasping complaint of a child nearby, the voice of the violet-headed girl at the next table, all moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the shining floor. And they too, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely remote, quiet. Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades. Her hand gleaming on the stained tablecloth was a shell from some far and wildly virginal sea. Then the illusion snapped like a nest of threads. The room grouped itself around him, voices, faces, movement. The garish shimmer of the light's overhead became real, became pretentious. Breath began. The slow respiration that she and he took in time with his docile hundred, the rise and fall of bosoms, the eternal meetinglessness play and interplay, and tossing and reiterating of word and phrase, all these wrenched his senses open to the suffocating pressure of life. And then her voice came at him, cool as the suspended dream he had left behind. I belong here, she murmured. I'm like these people. For an instant this seemed a sardonic and unnecessary paradox hurled at him across the impassable distances she created about herself. Her entranced head increased. Her eyes rested upon the semitic violinist who swayed his shoulders to the rhythm of the year's mellowest foxtrot. Something goes, ring a tinglingling, right in your ear. Again she spoke from the center of this pervasive illusion of her own. It amazed him. It was like blasphemy from in the mouth of a child. I'm like they are, like Japanese lanterns in crepe paper and the music of that orchestra. You're a young idiot, he insisted wildly. She shook her blonde head. No, I'm not. I am like them. You ought to see, you don't know me. She hesitated and her eyes came back to him, rested abruptly on his as though surprised at the last to see him there. I've got a streak of what you'd call cheapness. I don't know where I get it, but it's, oh, things like this and bright colors and gaudy vulgarity. I seem to belong here. These people could appreciate me and take me for granted and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever man I meet would just analyze me and tell me I'm this because of this or that because of that. Anthony for the moment wanted fiercely to paint her to set her down now as she was as with each relentless second she could never be again. What were you thinking? She asked. Just that I'm not a realist, he said. And then, no, only the romanticist preserves the things worth preserving. Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony and understanding formed, nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely physical at all and understanding remembered from the romancings of many generations of minds that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head, she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance, that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it, then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion. End of book one, chapter two, part two of two.