The Essential Fitzgerald - 45 Short Stories & Novels in One Edition. F. Scott Fitzgerald

insipidly from her changeling tongue. But she was the first fine woman he ever knew and one of the few good people who ever interested him. She made her goodness such an asset. Amory had decided that most good people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else distorted it to artificial geniality, and of course there were the ever-present prig and Pharisee—(but Amory never included them as being among the saved).

      ST. CECILIA

      “Over her gray and velvet dress,

      Under her molten, beaten hair,

      Color of rose in mock distress

      Flushes and fades and makes her fair;

      Fills the air from her to him

      With light and languor and little sighs,

      Just so subtly he scarcely knows…

      Laughing lightning, color of rose.”

      “Do you like me?”

      “Of course I do,” said Clara seriously.

      “Why?”

      “Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are spontaneous in each of us—or were originally.”

      “You’re implying that I haven’t used myself very well?”

      Clara hesitated.

      “Well, I can’t judge. A man, of course, has to go through a lot more, and I’ve been sheltered.”

      “Oh, don’t stall, please, Clara,” Amory interrupted; “but do talk about me a little, won’t you?”

      “Surely, I’d adore to.” She didn’t smile.

      “That’s sweet of you. First answer some questions. Am I painfully conceited?”

      “Well—no, you have tremendous vanity, but it’ll amuse the people who notice its preponderance.”

      “I see.”

      “You’re really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression when you think you’ve been slighted. In fact, you haven’t much self-respect.”

      “Centre of target twice, Clara. How do you do it? You never let me say a word.”

      “Of course not—I can never judge a man while he’s talking. But I’m not through; the reason you have so little real self-confidence, even though you gravely announce to the occasional philistine that you think you’re a genius, is that you’ve attributed all sorts of atrocious faults to yourself and are trying to live up to them. For instance, you’re always saying that you are a slave to highballs.”

      “But I am, potentially.”

      “And you say you’re a weak character, that you’ve no will.”

      “Not a bit of will—I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires—”

      “You are not!” She brought one little fist down onto the other. “You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.”

      “You certainly interest me. If this isn’t boring you, go on.”

      “I notice that when you want to stay over an extra day from college you go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first while the merits of going or staying are fairly clear in your mind. You let your imagination shinny on the side of your desires for a few hours, and then you decide. Naturally your imagination, after a little freedom, thinks up a million reasons why you should stay, so your decision when it comes isn’t true. It’s biassed.”

      “Yes,” objected Amory, “but isn’t it lack of will-power to let my imagination shinny on the wrong side?”

      “My dear boy, there’s your big mistake. This has nothing to do with will-power; that’s a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgment—the judgment to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you false, given half a chance.”

      “Well, I’ll be darned!” exclaimed Amory in surprise, “that’s the last thing I expected.”

      Clara didn’t gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she had started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He felt like a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of dishonesty finds that his own son, in the office, is changing the books once a week. His poor, mistreated will that he had been holding up to the scorn of himself and his friends, stood before him innocent, and his judgment walked off to prison with the unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee beside him. Clara’s was the only advice he ever asked without dictating the answer himself—except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor Darcy.

      How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with her was a rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had ever traded she was whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.

      “I’ll bet she won’t stay single long.”

      “Well, don’t scream it out. She ain’t lookin’ for no advice.”

      “Ain’t she beautiful!”

      (Enter a floorwalker—silence till he moves forward, smirking.)

      “Society person, ain’t she?”

      “Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say.”

      “Gee! girls, ain’t she some kid!”

      And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople gave her discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes without it. He knew she dressed very well, had always the best of everything in the house, and was inevitably waited upon by the head floorwalker at the very least.

      Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would walk beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water in the new air. She was very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light.

      “St. Cecelia,” he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and the people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon and Clara and Amory turned to fiery red.

      That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that night. He couldn’t help it.

      They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak.

      “I think,” he said and his voice trembled, “that if I lost faith in you I’d lose faith in God.”

      She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the matter.

      “Nothing,” she said slowly, “only this: five men have said that to me before, and it frightens me.”

      “Oh, Clara, is that your fate!”

      She did not answer.

      “I suppose love to you is—” he began.

      She turned like a flash.

      “I have never been in love.”

      They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him… never in love…. She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary’s eternal significance. But quite mechanically he heard himself saying:

      “And I love you—any latent greatness that I’ve got is… oh, I can’t talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position to marry you—”

      She shook her head.

      “No,” she said; “I’d never marry again. I’ve got my two children and I want myself for them. I like you—I