The Beautiful and Damned. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

sitting-room he had explained himself to himself with sophistic satisfaction. After all he had done the strongest thing, he thought. He had wanted to come up, he had come. Yet what happened later on that afternoon must be traced to the indignity he had experienced in the elevator; the girl was worrying him intolerably, so much so that when she came out he involuntarily drifted into criticism.

      “Who’s this Bloeckman, Gloria?”

      “A business friend of father’s.”

      “Odd sort of fellow!”

      “He doesn’t like you either,” she said with a sudden smile.

      Anthony laughed.

      “I’m flattered at his notice. He evidently considers me a—” He broke off with “Is he in love with you?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “The deuce you don’t,” he insisted. “Of course he is. I remember the look he gave me when we got back to the table. He’d probably have had me quietly assaulted by a delegation of movie supes if you hadn’t invented that phone call.”

      “He didn’t mind. I told him afterward what really happened.”

      “You told him!”

      “He asked me.”

      “I don’t like that very well,” he remonstrated.

      She laughed again.

      “Oh, you don’t?”

      “What business is it of his?”

      “None. That’s why I told him.”

      Anthony in a turmoil bit savagely at his mouth.

      “Why should I lie?” she demanded directly. “I’m not ashamed of anything I do. It happened to interest him to know that I kissed you, and I happened to be in a good humor, so I satisfied his curiosity by a simple and precise ‘yes.’ Being rather a sensible man, after his fashion, he dropped the subject.”

      “Except to say that he hated me.”

      “Oh, it worries you? Well, if you must probe this stupendous matter to its depths he didn’t say he hated you. I simply know he does.”

      “It doesn’t wor⎯”

      “Oh, let’s drop it!” she cried spiritedly. “It’s a most uninteresting matter to me.”

      With a tremendous effort Anthony made his acquiescence a twist of subject, and they drifted into an ancient question-and-answer game concerned with each other’s pasts, gradually warming as they discovered the age-old, immemorial resemblances in tastes and ideas. They said things that were more revealing than they intended—but each pretended to accept the other at face, or rather word, value.

      The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third—before long the best lines cancel out—and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.

      “It seems to me,” Anthony was saying earnestly, “that the position of a man with neither necessity nor ambition is unfortunate. Heaven knows it’d be pathetic of me to be sorry for myself—yet, sometimes I envy Dick.”

      Her silence was encouragement. It was as near as she ever came to an intentional lure.

      “—And there used to be dignified occupations for a gentleman who had leisure, things a little more constructive than filling up the landscape with smoke or juggling some one else’s money. There’s science, of course: sometimes I wish I’d taken a good foundation, say at Boston Tech. But now, by golly, I’d have to sit down for two years and struggle through the fundamentals of physics and chemistry.”

      She yawned.

      “I’ve told you I don’t know what anybody ought to do,” she said ungraciously, and at her indifference his rancor was born again.

      “Aren’t you interested in anything except yourself?”

      “Not much.”

      He glared; his growing enjoyment in the conversation was ripped to shreds. She had been irritable and vindictive all day, and it seemed to him that for this moment he hated her hard selfishness. He stared morosely at the fire.

      Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him—as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

      He moved closer and taking her hand pulled her ever so gently toward him until she half lay against his shoulder. She smiled up at him as he kissed her.

      “Gloria,” he whispered very softly. Again she had made a magic, subtle and pervading as a spilt perfume, irresistible and sweet.

      Afterward, neither the next day nor after many years, could he remember the important things of that afternoon. Had she been moved? In his arms had she spoken a little—or at all? What measure of enjoyment had she taken in his kisses? And had she at any time lost herself ever so little?

      Oh, for him there was no doubt. He had risen and paced the floor in sheer ecstasy. That such a girl should be; should poise curled in a corner of the couch like a swallow newly landed from a clean swift flight, watching him with inscrutable eyes. He would stop his pacing and, half shy each time at first, drop his arm around her and find her kiss.

      She was fascinating, he told her. He had never met any one like her before. He besought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he didn’t want to fall in love. He wasn’t coming to see her any more—already she had haunted too many of his ways.

      What delicious romance! His true reaction was neither fear nor sorrow—only this deep delight in being with her that colored the banality of his words and made the mawkish seem sad and the posturing seem wise. He would come back—eternally. He should have known!

      “This is all. It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn’t do—and wouldn’t last.” As he spoke there was in his heart that tremulousness that we take for sincerity in ourselves.