This Side of Paradise..........................................................................................................................................1

F. Scott Fitzgerald ....................................................................................................................................1

AMORY BLAINE inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him

worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over

the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful

Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice

O'Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his

tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he

hovered in the background of his family's life, an unassertive figure with a face halfobliterated by lifeless,

silky hair, continually occupied in "taking care" of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn't

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father's estate at Lake Geneva,

Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Conventan educational extravagance that in her youth was only

for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthyshowed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate

art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had her youth passed in renaissance glory, she

was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy

American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had

some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small

talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O'Hara absorbed the sort of

education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people

one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas,

in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married himthis almost

entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburnhaired boy, with

great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy

dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father's private car, from

Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down

to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she

made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphereespecially after several astounding bracers.

So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying governesses on the beach at Newport, or being

spanked or tutored or read to from "Do and Dare," or "Frank on the Mississippi," Amory was biting

acquiescent bellboys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies,

"Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one

"I am feeling very old today, Amory," she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely

modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardt's. "My nerves are on edgeon edge. We must leave this terrifying

Amory's penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no

"I want you to take a redhot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the

tub if you wish." She fed him sections of the "Fjtes Galantes" before he was ten; at eleven he could talk

glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone in the

hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother's apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite

tipsy. This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar,

plebeian reaction. Though this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became part of

"This son of mine," he heard her tell a room full of awestruck, admiring women one day, "is entirely

sophisticated and quite charmingbut delicatewe're all delicate; here, you know." Her hand was radiantly

outlined against her beautiful bosom; then sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot cordial.

They rejoiced, for she was a brave raconteuse, but many were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night

These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids, the private car, or Mr. Blaine when

available, and very often a physician. When Amory had the whoopingcough four disgusted specialists

glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including

physicians and nurses, totalled fourteen. However, blood being thicker than broth, he was pulled through.

The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of Lake Geneva; they had quite enough relatives

to serve in place of friends, and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But Beatrice grew more

and more prone to like only new acquaintances, as there were certain stories, such as the history of her

constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat

at regular intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else they would sweep in and lay siege to

her nerves. But Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the floating population of

"They have accents, my dear," she told Amory, "not Southern accents or Boston accents, not an accent

attached to any locality, just an accent"she became dreamy. "They pick up old, motheaten London accents

that are down on their luck and have to be used by some one. They talk as an English butler might after

several years in a Chicago grandopera company." She became almost incoherent"Supposetime in every

Western woman's lifeshe feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to haveaccentthey try to impress

me, my dear" Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she considered her soul quite as ill, and

therefore important in her life. She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more

attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an

enchantingly wavering attitude. Often she deplored the bourgeois quality of the American Catholic clergy,

and was quite sure that had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals her soul would still be

a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome. Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport. "Ah, Bishop

Wiston," she would declare, "I do not want to talk of myself. I can imagine the stream of hysterical women

fluttering at your doors, beseeching you to be simpatico"then after an interlude filled by the clergyman"but

Only to bishops and above did she divulge her clerical romance. When she had first returned to her country

there had been a pagan, Swinburnian young man in Asheville, for whose passionate kisses and unsentimental

conversations she had taken a decided penchantthey had discussed the matter pro and con with an

intellectual romancing quite devoid of sappiness. Eventually she had decided to marry for background, and

the young pagan from Asheville had gone through a spiritual crisis, joined the Catholic Church, and was

"Indeed, Mrs. Blaine, he is still delightful company quite the cardinal's righthand man."

"Amory will go to him one day, I know," breathed the beautiful lady, "and Monsignor Dark will understand

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored

occasionallythe idea being that he was to "keep up," at each place "taking up the work where he left off," yet

as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. What a few more years of

this life would have made of him is problematical. However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with

Beatrice, his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and after a series of frantic telegrams to

Europe and America, to the amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around and returned

to New York to deposit Amory at the pier. You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.

After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium

tremens, and Amory was left in Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his aunt and

uncle. There the crude, vulgar air of Western civilization first catches himin his underwear, so to speak.

"I am going to have a bobbing party," it said, "on Thursday, December the seventeenth, at five o'clock, and I

He had been two months in Minneapolis, and his chief struggle had been the concealing from "the other guys

at school" how particularly superior he felt himself to be, yet this conviction was built upon shifting sands.

He had shown off one day in French class (he was in senior French class) to the utter confusion of Mr.

Reardon, whose accent Amory damned contemptuously, and to the delight of the class. Mr. Reardon, who

had spent several weeks in Paris ten years before, took his revenge on the verbs, whenever he had his book

open. But another time Amory showed off in history class, with quite disastrous results, for the boys there

were his own age, and they shrilled innuendoes at each other all the following week:

"AwI b'lieve, doncherknow, the Umuricun revolution was lawgely an affair of the middul clawses," or

"Washington came of very good bloodaw, quite goodI b'lieve." Amory ingeniously tried to retrieve himself

by blundering on purpose. Two years before he had commenced a history of the United States which, though

it only got as far as the Colonial Wars, had been pronounced by his mother completely enchanting. His chief

disadvantage lay in athletics, but as soon as he discovered that it was the touchstone of power and popularity

at school, he began to make furious, persistent efforts to excel in the winter sports, and with his ankles aching

and bending in spite of his efforts, he skated valiantly around the Lorelie rink every afternoon, wondering

how soon he would be able to carry a hockeystick without getting it inexplicably tangled in his skates.

The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an

intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle. During the afternoon he brought it to light with a

sigh, and after some consideration and a preliminary draft in the back of Collar and Daniel's "FirstYear

My dear Miss St. Claire: Your truly charming envitation for the evening of next Thursday evening was truly

delightful to recieve this morning. I will be charm and inchanted indeed to present my compliments on next

On Thursday, therefore, he walked pensively along the slippery, shovelscraped sidewalks, and came in sight

of Myra's house, on the halfhour after five, a lateness which he fancied his mother would have favored. He

waited on the doorstep with his eyes nonchalantly halfclosed, and planned his entrance with precision. He

would cross the floor, not too hastily, to Mrs. St. Claire, and say with exactly the correct modulation:

"My dear Mrs. St. Claire, I'm frightfully sorry to be late, but my maid"he paused there and realized he would

be quoting"but my uncle and I had to see a fella Yes, I've met your enchanting daughter at dancingschool."

Then he would shake hands, using that slight, halfforeign bow, with all the starchy little females, and nod to

the fellas who would be standing 'round, paralyzed into rigid groups for mutual protection.

A butler (one of the three in Minneapolis) swung open the door. Amory stepped inside and divested himself

of cap and coat. He was mildly surprised not to hear the shrill squawk of conversation from the next room,

and he decided it must be quite formal. He approved of thatas he approved of the butler.

"Oh, yeah," he declared, "she's here." He was unaware that his failure to be cockney was ruining his standing.

"But," continued the butler, his voice rising unnecessarily, "she's the only one what is here. The party's gone."

"She's been waitin' for Amory Blaine. That's you, ain't it? Her mother says that if you showed up by

Amory's despair was crystallized by the appearance of Myra herself, bundled to the ears in a polo coat, her

"'Lo, Myra." He had described the state of his vitality. "Wellyou got here, anyways."

"WellI'll tell you. I guess you don't know about the auto accident," he romanced.

"Probably killed the engine," he suggested. Amory would have put him on the rack without a scruple.

"We'll go now," said Myra coolly. "You see, Amory, the bobs were ordered for five and everybody was here,

"So mama said for me to wait till ha'past five. We'll catch the bobs before it gets to the Minnehaha Club,

Amory's shredded poise dropped from him. He pictured the happy party jingling along snowy streets, the

appearance of the limousine, the horrible public descent of him and Myra before sixty reproachful eyes, his

"Nothing. I was just yawning. Are we going to surely catch up with 'em before they get there?" He was

encouraging a faint hope that they might slip into the Minnehaha Club and meet the others there, be found in

He became conscious of his stomach. As they stepped into the machine he hurriedly slapped the paint of

diplomacy over a rather boxlike plan he had conceived. It was based upon some "tradelasts" gleaned at

dancingschool, to the effect that he was "awful goodlooking and English, sort of."

"Myra," he said, lowering his voice and choosing his words carefully, "I beg a thousand pardons. Can you

ever forgive me?" She regarded him gravely, his intent green eyes, his mouth, that to her thirteenyearold,

arrowcollar taste was the quintessence of romance. Yes, Myra could forgive him very easily.

"I'm awful," he said sadly. "I'm diff'runt. I don't know why I make faux pas. 'Cause I don't care, I s'pose."

Myra pictured an allnight tobacco debauch, with Amory pale and reeling from the effect of nicotined lungs.

"I don't care," he persisted gloomily. "I gotta. I got the habit. I've done a lot of things that if my fambly

knew"he hesitated, giving her imagination time to picture dark horrors"I went to the burlesque show last

Myra was quite overcome. He turned the green eyes on her again. "You're the only girl in town I like much,"

Thick dusk had descended outside, and as the limousine made a sudden turn she was jolted against him; their

hands touched. "You shouldn't smoke, Amory," she whispered. "Don't you know that?"

"Oh, yes, you do! You got a crush on Froggy Parker. I guess everybody knows that."

A silence, while Amory thrilled. There was something fascinating about Myra, shut away here cosily from

the dim, chill air. Myra, a little bundle of clothes, with strands of yellow hair curling out from under her

"Because I've got a crush, too" He paused, for he heard in the distance the sound of young laughter, and,

peering through the frosted glass along the lamplit street, he made out the dark outline of the bobbing party.

He must act quickly. He reached over with a violent, jerky effort, and clutched Myra's handher thumb, to be

"Tell him to go to the Minnehaha straight," he whispered. "I wanta talk to youI got to talk to you."

Myra made out the party ahead, had an instant vision of her mother, and thenalas for conventionglanced into

the eyes beside. "Turn down this side street, Richard, and drive straight to the Minnehaha Club!" she cried

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

"I can kiss her," he thought. "I'll bet I can. I'll bet I can!" Overhead the sky was half crystalline, half misty,

and the night around was chill and vibrant with rich tension. From the Country Club steps the roads stretched

away, dark creases on the white blanket; huge heaps of snow lining the sides like the tracks of giant moles.

"Pale moons like that one"Amory made a vague gesture"make people mysterieuse. You look like a young

witch with her cap off and her hair sorta mussed"her hands clutched at her hair"Oh, leave it, it looks good."

They drifted up the stairs and Myra led the way into the little den of his dreams, where a cosy fire was

burning before a big sinkdown couch. A few years later this was to be a great stage for Amory, a cradle for

"There's always a bunch of shy fellas," he commented, "sitting at the tail of the bob, sorta lurkin' an'

whisperin' an' pushin' each other off. Then there's always some crazy crosseyed girl"he gave a terrifying

"Oh always talking about crazy things. Why don't you come skiing with Marylyn and I tomorrow?"

"I don't like girls in the daytime," he said shortly, and then, thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: "But I like

you." He cleared his throat. "I like you first and second and third." Myra's eyes became dreamy. What a story

this would make to tell Marylyn! Here on the couch with this wonderfullooking boy the little fire the sense

"I like you the first twentyfive," she confessed, her voice trembling, "and Froggy Parker twentysixth."

Froggy had fallen twentyfive places in one hour. As yet he had not even noticed it.

But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed Myra's cheek. He had never kissed a girl

before, and he tasted his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit. Then their lips brushed like

young wild flowers in the wind. "We're awful," rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into his, her head

drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He

desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss any one; he became conscious of his

face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of

sight, up in the corner of his mind. "Kiss me again." Her voice came out of a great void.

Myra sprang up, her cheeks pink with bruised vanity, the great bow on the back of her head trembling

"I'll tell mama you kissed me! I will too! I will too! I'll tell mama, and she won't let me play with you!"

Amory rose and stared at her helplessly, as though she were a new animal of whose presence on the earth he

The door opened suddenly, and Myra's mother appeared on the threshold, fumbling with her lorgnette.

"Well," she began, adjusting it benignantly, "the man at the desk told me you two children were up here How

do you do, Amory." Amory watched Myra and waited for the crashbut none came. The pout faded, the high

pink subsided, and Myra's voice was placid as a summer lake when she answered her mother.

"Oh, we started so late, mama, that I thought we might as well" He heard from below the shrieks of laughter,

and smelled the vapid odor of hot chocolate and teacakes as he silently followed mother and daughter

downstairs. The sound of the graphophone mingled with the voices of many girls humming the air, and a

"CaseyJonesmounted to the cabun CaseyJones'th his orders in his hand. CaseyJonesmounted to the

Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he wore moccasins that were born yellow, but

after many applications of oil and dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish brown; he wore a gray

plaid mackinaw coat, and a red toboggan cap. His dog, Count Del Monte, ate the red cap, so his uncle gave

him a gray one that pulled down over his face. The trouble with this one was that you breathed into it and

your breath froze; one day the darn thing froze his cheek. He rubbed snow on his cheek, but it turned

The Count Del Monte ate a box of bluing once, but it didn't hurt him. Later, however, he lost his mind and

ran madly up the street, bumping into fences, rolling in gutters, and pursuing his eccentric course out of

Amory's life. Amory cried on his bed. "Poor little Count," he cried. "Oh, poor little Count!" After several

Amory and Frog Parker considered that the greatest line in literature occurred in Act III of "Arsene Lupin."

"If one can't be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal."

He was interested in whether McGovern of Minnesota would make the first or second AllAmerican, how to

do the cardpass, how to do the coinpass, chameleon ties, how babies were born, and whether

Among other things he read: "For the Honor of the School," "Little Women" (twice), "The Common Law,"

"Sapho," "Dangerous Dan McGrew," "The Broad Highway" (three times), "The Fall of the House of Usher,"

"Three Weeks," "Mary Ware, the Little Colonel's Chum," "Gunga Din," The Police Gazette, and JimJam

Jems. He had all the Henty biasses in history, and was particularly fond of the cheerful murder stories of

Mary Roberts Rinehart. School ruined his French and gave him a distaste for standard authors. His masters

He collected locks of hair from many girls. He wore the rings of several. Finally he could borrow no more

rings, owing to his nervous habit of chewing them out of shape. This, it seemed, usually aroused the jealous

suspicions of the next borrower. All through the summer months Amory and Frog Parker went each week to

the Stock Company. Afterward they would stroll home in the balmy air of August night, dreaming along

Hennepin and Nicollet Avenues, through the gay crowd. Amory wondered how people could fail to notice

that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes

stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the

asphalts of fourteen. Always, after he was in bed, there were voicesindefinite, fading, enchantingjust outside

his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one about

becoming a great halfback, or the one about the Japanese invasion, when he was rewarded by being made

the youngest general in the world. It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being. This, too, was

Before he was summoned back to Lake Geneva, he had appeared, shy but inwardly glowing, in his first long

trousers, set off by a purple accordion tie and a "Belmont" collar with the edges unassailably meeting, purple

socks, and handkerchief with a purple border peeping from his breast pocket. But more than that, he had

formulated his first philosophy, a code to live by, which, as near as it can be named, was a sort of aristocratic

egotism. He had realized that his best interests were bound up with those of a certain variant, changing

person, whose label, in order that his past might always be identified with him, was Amory Blaine. Amory

marked himself a fortunate youth, capable of infinite expansion for good or evil. He did not consider himself

a "strong char'c'ter," but relied on his facility (learn things sorta quick) and his superior mentality (read a lotta

deep books). He was proud of the fact that he could never become a mechanical or scientific genius. From no

other heights was he debarred. Physically. Amory thought that he was exceedingly handsome. He was. He

Socially. Here his condition was, perhaps, most dangerous. He granted himself personality, charm,

magnetism, poise, the power of dominating all contemporary males, the gift of fascinating all women.

Now a confession will have to be made. Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to itlater

in life he almost completely slew itbut at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other

boys ... unscrupulousness ... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil ... a certain

coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty ... a shifting sense of honor ... an unholy

selfishness ... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex. There was, also, a curious strain of

weakness running crosswise through his makeup ... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys

usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity ... he

was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he

Vanity, tempered with selfsuspicion if not selfknowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a

desire to "pass" as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world ... with this background did

The train slowed up with midsummer languor at Lake Geneva, and Amory caught sight of his mother waiting

in her electric on the gravelled station drive. It was an ancient electric, one of the early types, and painted

gray. The sight of her sitting there, slenderly erect, and of her face, where beauty and dignity combined,

melting to a dreamy recollected smile, filled him with a sudden great pride of her. As they kissed coolly and

he stepped into the electric, he felt a quick fear lest he had lost the requisite charm to measure up to her.

She looked left and right, she slipped cautiously into a speed of two miles an hour, beseeching Amory to act

as sentinel; and at one busy crossing she made him get out and run ahead to signal her forward like a traffic

"You are tall but you're still very handsome you've skipped the awkward age, or is that sixteen; perhaps it's

"But, my dear boy, what odd clothes! They look as if they were a set don't they? Is your underwear purple,

"You must go to Brooks' and get some really nice suits. Oh, we'll have a talk tonight or perhaps tomorrow

night. I want to tell you about your heartyou've probably been neglecting your heartand you don't know."

Amory thought how superficial was the recent overlay of his own generation. Aside from a minute shyness,

he felt that the old cynical kinship with his mother had not been one bit broken. Yet for the first few days he

wandered about the gardens and along the shore in a state of superloneliness, finding a lethargic content in

The sixty acres of the estate were dotted with old and new summer houses and many fountains and white

benches that came suddenly into sight from foliagehung hidingplaces; there was a great and constantly

increasing family of white cats that prowled the many flowerbeds and were silhouetted suddenly at night

against the darkening trees. It was on one of the shadowy paths that Beatrice at last captured Amory, after

Mr. Blaine had, as usual, retired for the evening to his private library. After reproving him for avoiding her,

she took him for a long tte`tjte in the moonlight. He could not reconcile himself to her beauty, that was

mother to his own, the exquisite neck and shoulders, the grace of a fortunate woman of thirty.

"Amory, dear," she crooned softly, "I had such a strange, weird time after I left you."

"The doctors told me"her voice sang on a confidential note"that if any man alive had done the consistent

drinking that I have, he would have been physically shattered, my dear, and in his gravelong in his grave."

"Yes," continued Beatrice tragically, "I had dreams wonderful visions." She pressed the palms of her hands

into her eyes. "I saw bronze rivers lapping marble shores, and great birds that soared through the air,

particolored birds with iridescent plumage. I heard strange music and the flare of barbaric trumpets what?"

"That was allit merely recurred and recurred gardens that flaunted coloring against which this would be quite

dull, moons that whirled and swayed, paler than winter moons, more golden than harvest moons"

"Quite wellas well as I will ever be. I am not understood, Amory. I know that can't express it to you, Amory,

Amory was quite moved. He put his arm around his mother, rubbing his head gently against her shoulder.

"Tell me about you, Amory. Did you have two horrible years?" Amory considered lying, and then decided

"No, Beatrice. I enjoyed them. I adapted myself to the bourgeoisie. I became conventional." He surprised

himself by saying that, and he pictured how Froggy would have gaped. "Beatrice," he said suddenly, "I want

to go away to school. Everybody in Minneapolis is going to go away to school." Beatrice showed some

On Beatrice's suggestion the subject was dropped for the rest of the walk, but a week later she delighted him

by saying: "Amory, I have decided to let you have your way. If you still want to, you can go to school."

"It's being arranged," continued Beatrice. "It's better that you should go away. I'd have preferred you to have

gone to Eton, and then to Christ Church, Oxford, but it seems impracticable nowand for the present we'll let

"Heaven knows. It seems my fate to fret away my years in this country. Not for a second do I regret being

Americanindeed, I think that a regret typical of very vulgar people, and I feel sure we are the great coming

nationyet"and she sighed"I feel my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower civilization, a

land of greens and autumnal browns" Amory did not answer, so his mother continued:

"My regret is that you haven't been abroad, but still, as you are a man, it's better that you should grow up here

"Next month. You'll have to start East a little early to take your examinations. After that you'll have a free

"To Monsignor Darcy, Amory. He wants to see you. He went to Harrow and then to Yalebecame a Catholic. I

want him to talk to youI feel he can be such a help" She stroked his auburn hair gently. "Dear Amory, dear

So early in September Amory, provided with "six suits summer underwear, six suits winter underwear, one

sweater or T shirt, one jersey, one overcoat, winter, etc.," set out for New England, the land of schools.

There were Andover and Exeter with their memories of New England deadlarge, collegelike democracies;

St. Mark's, Groton, St. Regis'recruited from Boston and the Knickerbocker families of New York; St. Paul's,

with its great rinks; Pomfret and St. George's, prosperous and welldressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which

prepared the wealth of the Middle West for social success at Yale; Pawling, Westminster, Choate, Kent, and a

hundred others; all milling out their wellsetup, conventional, impressive type, year after year; their mental

stimulus the college entrance exams; their vague purpose set forth in a hundred circulars as "To impart a

Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training as a Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting the

problems of his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation in the Arts and Sciences."

At St. Regis' Amory stayed three days and took his exams with a scoffing confidence, then doubling back to

New York to pay his tutelary visit. The metropolis, barely glimpsed, made little impression on him, except

for the sense of cleanliness he drew from the tall white buildings seen from a Hudson River steamboat in the

early morning. Indeed, his mind was so crowded with dreams of athletic prowess at school that he considered

this visit only as a rather tiresome prelude to the great adventure. This, however, it did not prove to be.

Monsignor Darcy's house was an ancient, rambling structure set on a hill overlooking the river, and there

lived its owner, between his trips to all parts of the RomanCatholic world, rather like an exiled Stuart king

waiting to be called to the rule of his land. Monsignor was fortyfour then, and bustlinga trifle too stout for

symmetry, with hair the color of spun gold, and a brilliant, enveloping personality. When he came into a

room clad in his full purple regalia from thatch to toe, he resembled a Turner sunset, and attracted both

admiration and attention. He had written two novels: one of them violently antiCatholic, just before his

conversion, and five years later another, in which he had attempted to turn all his clever jibes against

Catholics into even cleverer innuendoes against Episcopalians. He was intensely ritualistic, startlingly

dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.

Children adored him because he was like a child; youth revelled in his company because he was still a youth,

and couldn't be shocked. In the proper land and century he might have been a Richelieuat present he was a

very moral, very religious (if not particularly pious) clergyman, making a great mystery about pulling rusty

He and Amory took to each other at first sight the jovial, impressive prelate who could dazzle an embassy

ball, and the greeneyed, intent youth, in his first long trousers, accepted in their own minds a relation of

"My dear boy, I've been waiting to see you for years. Take a big chair and we'll have a chat."

"So your mother says a remarkable woman; have a cigarette I'm sure you smoke. Well, if you're like me, you

"Of course. You'll hate school for a while, too, but I'm glad you're going to St. Regis's."

"Because it's a gentleman's school, and democracy won't hit you so early. You'll find plenty of that in

"I want to go to Princeton," said Amory. "I don't know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I

used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes." Monsignor chuckled.

"Oh, you're differentI think of Princeton as being lazy and goodlooking and aristocraticyou know, like a

"Yes, and for the Southern Confederacy." He was rather sceptical about being an Irish patriothe suspected

that being Irish was being somewhat commonbut Monsignor assured him that Ireland was a romantic lost

cause and Irish people quite charming, and that it should, by all means, be one of his principal biasses.

After a crowded hour which included several more cigarettes, and during which Monsignor learned, to his

surprise but not to his horror, that Amory had not been brought up a Catholic, he announced that he had

another guest. This turned out to be the Honorable Thornton Hancock, of Boston, exminister to The Hague,

author of an erudite history of the Middle Ages and the last of a distinguished, patriotic, and brilliant family.

"He comes here for a rest," said Monsignor confidentially, treating Amory as a contemporary. "I act as an

escape from the weariness of agnosticism, and I think I'm the only man who knows how his staid old mind is

Their first luncheon was one of the memorable events of Amory's early life. He was quite radiant and gave

off a peculiar brightness and charm. Monsignor called out the best that he had thought by question and

suggestion, and Amory talked with an ingenious brilliance of a thousand impulses and desires and repulsions

and faiths and fears. He and Monsignor held the floor, and the older man, with his less receptive, less

accepting, yet certainly not colder mentality, seemed content to listen and bask in the mellow sunshine that

played between these two. Monsignor gave the effect of sunlight to many people; Amory gave it in his youth

and, to some extent, when he was very much older, but never again was it quite so mutually spontaneous.

"He's a radiant boy," thought Thornton Hancock, who had seen the splendor of two continents and talked

with Parnell and Gladstone and Bismarckand afterward he added to Monsignor: "But his education ought not

to be intrusted to a school or college." But for the next four years the best of Amory's intellect was

concentrated on matters of popularity, the intricacies of a university social system and American Society as

...In all, a wonderful week, that saw Amory's mind turned inside out, a hundred of his theories confirmed, and

his joy of life crystallized to a thousand ambitions. Not that the conversation was scholastic heaven forbid!

Amory had only the vaguest idea as to what Bernard Shaw wasbut Monsignor made quite as much out of

"The Beloved Vagabond" and "Sir Nigel," taking good care that Amory never once felt out of his depth.

But the trumpets were sounding for Amory's preliminary skirmish with his own generation.

"You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not," said Monsignor.

Amory's two years at St. Regis', though in turn painful and triumphant, had as little real significance in his

own life as the American "prep" school, crushed as it is under the heel of the universities, has to American

life in general. We have no Eton to create the selfconsciousness of a governing class; we have, instead,

clean, flaccid and innocuous preparatory schools. He went all wrong at the start, was generally considered

both conceited and arrogant, and universally detested. He played football intensely, alternating a reckless

brilliancy with a tendency to keep himself as safe from hazard as decency would permit. In a wild panic he

backed out of a fight with a boy his own size, to a chorus of scorn, and a week later, in desperation, picked a

battle with another boy very much bigger, from which he emerged badly beaten, but rather proud of himself.

He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward

his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to

sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since

they were not among the ilite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before

which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.

There were some few grains of comfort. Whenever Amory was submerged, his vanity was the last part to go

below the surface, so he could still enjoy a comfortable glow when "Wookeywookey," the deaf old

housekeeper, told him that he was the bestlooking boy she had ever seen. It had pleased him to be the

lightest and youngest man on the first football squad; it pleased him when Doctor Dougall told him at the end

of a heated conference that he could, if he wished, get the best marks in school. But Doctor Dougall was

wrong. It was temperamentally impossible for Amory to get the best marks in school.

Miserable, confined to bounds, unpopular with both faculty and studentsthat was Amory's first term. But at

Christmas he had returned to Minneapolis, tightlipped and strangely jubilant. "Oh, I was sort of fresh at

first," he told Frog Parker patronizingly, "but I got along finelightest man on the squad. You ought to go

away to school, Froggy. It's great stuff." INCIDENT OF THE WELLMEANING PROFESSOR

On the last night of his first term, Mr. Margotson, the senior master, sent word to study hall that Amory was

to come to his room at nine. Amory suspected that advice was forthcoming, but he determined to be

His summoner received him gravely, and motioned him to a chair. He hemmed several times and looked

"I've noticed you this year and I like you. I think you have in you the makings of a a very good man."

"Yes, sir," Amory managed to articulate. He hated having people talk as if he were an admitted failure.

"But I've noticed," continued the older man blindly, "that you're not very popular with the boys."

"Ah I thought you might not understand exactly what it was they ah objected to. I'm going to tell you,

because I believe ah that when a boy knows his difficulties he's better able to cope with them to conform to

what others expect of him." He ahemmed again with delicate reticence, and continued: "They seem to think

Amory could stand no more. He rose from his chair, scarcely controlling his voice when he spoke.

"I knowoh, don't you s'pose I know." His voice rose. "I know what they think; do you s'pose you have to tell

He left the room hurriedly. In the cool air outside, as he walked to his house, he exulted in his refusal to be

"That damn old fool!" he cried wildly. "As if I didn't know!" He decided, however, that this was a good

excuse not to go back to study hall that night, so, comfortably couched up in his room, he munched nabiscos

There was a bright star in February. New York burst upon him on Washington's Birthday with the brilliance

of a longanticipated event. His glimpse of it as a vivid whiteness against a deepblue sky had left a picture

of splendor that rivalled the dream cities in the Arabian Nights; but this time he saw it by electric light, and

romance gleamed from the chariotrace sign on Broadway and from the women's eyes at the Astor, where he

and young Paskert from St. Regis' had dinner. When they walked down the aisle of the theatre, greeted by the

nervous twanging and discord of untuned violins and the sensuous, heavy fragrance of paint and powder, he

moved in a sphere of epicurean delight. Everything enchanted him. The play was "The Little Millionaire,"

with George M. Cohan, and there was one stunning young brunette who made him sit with brimming eyes in

the ecstasy of watching her dance. "Oh you wonderful girl, What a wonderful girl you are"

sang the tenor, and Amory agreed silently, but passionately. "All your wonderful words Thrill me through"

The violins swelled and quavered on the last notes, the girl sank to a crumpled butterfly on the stage, a great

burst of clapping filled the house. Oh, to fall in love like that, to the languorous magic melody of such a tune!

The last scene was laid on a roofgarden, and the 'cellos sighed to the musical moon, while light adventure

and facile frothlike comedy flitted back and forth in the calcium. Amory was on fire to be an habitui of

roofgardens, to meet a girl who should look like that better, that very girl; whose hair would be drenched

with golden moonlight, while at his elbow sparkling wine was poured by an unintelligible waiter. When the

curtain fell for the last time he gave such a long sigh that the people in front of him twisted around and stared

This took his mind off the play, and he wondered if he really did seem handsome to the population of New

Paskert and he walked in silence toward their hotel. The former was the first to speak. His uncertain

"I'd be proud to take her home and introduce her to my people," continued Paskert.

Amory was distinctly impressed. He wished he had said it instead of Paskert. It sounded so mature.

"No, sir, not by a darn sight," said the worldly youth with emphasis, "and I know that girl's as good as gold. I

can tell." They wandered on, mixing in the Broadway crowd, dreaming on the music that eddied out of the

cafis. New faces flashed on and off like myriad lights, pale or rouged faces, tired, yet sustained by a weary

excitement. Amory watched them in fascination. He was planning his life. He was going to live in New York,

and be known at every restaurant and cafi, wearing a dresssuit from early evening to early morning,

October of his second and last year at St. Regis' was a high point in Amory's memory. The game with Groton

was played from three of a snappy, exhilarating afternoon far into the crisp autumnal twilight, and Amory at

quarterback, exhorting in wild despair, making impossible tackles, calling signals in a voice that had

diminished to a hoarse, furious whisper, yet found time to revel in the bloodstained bandage around his

head, and the straining, glorious heroism of plunging, crashing bodies and aching limbs. For those minutes

courage flowed like wine out of the November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, one with the searover on

the prow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and Horatius, Sir Nigel and Ted Coy, scraped and stripped into

trim and then flung by his own will into the breach, beating back the tide, hearing from afar the thunder of

cheers ... finally bruised and weary, but still elusive, circling an end, twisting, changing pace, straightarming

... falling behind the Groton goal with two men on his legs, in the only touchdown of the game.

From the scoffing superiority of sixthform year and success Amory looked back with cynical wonder on his

status of the year before. He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus

Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolisthese had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis'. But the

Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting

eyes of a boardingschool, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him, and begun to lay down

new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were

unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he

had suffered, his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now

taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarterback, a clever actor, and the editor of

the St. Regis Tattler: it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not

After the football season he slumped into dreamy content. The night of the preholiday dance he slipped

away and went early to bed for the pleasure of hearing the violin music cross the grass and come surging in at

his window. Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafis in Mont Martre, where ivory women

delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian

waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure. In the spring he read

"L'Allegro," by request, and was inspired to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes of

Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that he might dress and go out to the archaic

swing that hung from an appletree near the sixthform house. Seating himself in this he would pump higher

and higher until he got the effect of swinging into the wide air, into a fairyland of piping satyrs and nymphs

with the faces of fairhaired girls he passed in the streets of Eastchester. As the swing reached its highest

point, Arcady really lay just over the brow of a certain hill, where the brown road dwindled out of sight in a

He read voluminously all spring, the beginning of his eighteenth year: "The Gentleman from Indiana," "The

New Arabian Nights," "The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne," "The Man Who Was Thursday," which he liked

without understanding; "Stover at Yale," that became somewhat of a textbook; "Dombey and Son," because

he thought he really should read better stuff; Robert Chambers, David Graham Phillips, and E. Phillips

Oppenheim complete, and a scattering of Tennyson and Kipling. Of all his class work only "L'Allegro" and

As June drew near, he felt the need of conversation to formulate his own ideas, and, to his surprise, found a

cophilosopher in Rahill, the president of the sixth form. In many a talk, on the highroad or lying bellydown

along the edge of the baseball diamond, or late at night with their cigarettes glowing in the dark, they

threshed out the questions of school, and there was developed the term "slicker."

"Got tobacco?" whispered Rahill one night, putting his head inside the door five minutes after lights.

Amory sat up in bed and lit a cigarette while Rahill settled for a conversation. Rahill's favorite subject was

the respective futures of the sixth form, and Amory never tired of outlining them for his benefit.

"Ted Converse? 'At's easy. He'll fail his exams, tutor all summer at Harstrum's, get into Sheff with about four

conditions, and flunk out in the middle of the freshman year. Then he'll go back West and raise hell for a year

or so; finally his father will make him go into the paint business. He'll marry and have four sons, all bone

heads. He'll always think St. Regis's spoiled him, so he'll send his sons to day school in Portland. He'll die of

locomotor ataxia when he's fortyone, and his wife will give a baptizing stand or whatever you call it to the

"Hold up, Amory. That's too darned gloomy. How about yourself?" "I'm in a superior class. You are, too.

"Sure you are. You've got a darn good head on you." But Amory knew that nothing in the abstract, no theory

or generality, ever moved Rahill until he stubbed his toe upon the concrete minutif of it.

"Haven't," insisted Rahill. "I let people impose on me here and don't get anything out of it. I'm the prey of my

friends, damn itdo their lessons, get 'em out of trouble, pay 'em stupid summer visits, and always entertain

their kid sisters; keep my temper when they get selfish and then they think they pay me back by voting for me

and telling me I'm the 'big man' of St. Regis's. I want to get where everybody does their own work and I can

"Well, it's something that that there's a lot of them. You're not one, and neither am I, though I am more than

"Why why, I suppose that the sign of it is when a fellow slicks his hair back with water."

They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker was goodlooking or cleanlooking; he had

brains, social brains, that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular,

admired, and never in trouble. He dressed well, was particularly neat in appearance, and derived his name

from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic, parted in the middle, and

slicked back as the current of fashion dictated. The slickers of that year had adopted tortoiseshell spectacles

as badges of their slickerhood, and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill never missed

one. The slicker seemed distributed through school, always a little wiser and shrewder than his

contemporaries, managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully concealed.

Amory found the slicker a most valuable classification until his junior year in college, when the outline

became so blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality.

Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and

talentsalso Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.

This was a first real break from the hypocrisy of school tradition. The slicker was a definite element of

4.Gets to college and has a problematical future. Feels lost without his circle, and always says that school

days were happiest, after all. Goes back to school and makes speeches about what St. Regis's boys are doing.

Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would be the only boy entering that year from St.

Regis'. Yale had a romance and glamour from the tales of Minneapolis, and St. Regis' men who had been

"tapped for Skull and Bones," but Princeton drew him most, with its atmosphere of bright colors and its

alluring reputation as the pleasantest country club in America. Dwarfed by the menacing college exams,

Amory's school days drifted into the past. Years afterward, when he went back to St. Regis', he seemed to

have forgotten the successes of sixthform year, and to be able to picture himself only as the unadjustable

boy who had hurried down corridors, jeered at by his rabid contemporaries mad with common sense.

AT FIRST Amory noticed only the wealth of sunshine creeping across the long, green swards, dancing on the

leaded windowpanes, and swimming around the tops of spires and towers and battlemented walls. Gradually

he realized that he was really walking up University Place, selfconscious about his suitcase, developing a

new tendency to glare straight ahead when he passed any one. Several times he could have sworn that men

turned to look at him critically. He wondered vaguely if there was something the matter with his clothes, and

wished he had shaved that morning on the train. He felt unnecessarily stiff and awkward among these

whiteflannelled, bareheaded youths, who must be juniors and seniors, judging from the savoir faire with

He found that 12 University Place was a large, dilapidated mansion, at present apparently uninhabited,

though he knew it housed usually a dozen freshmen. After a hurried skirmish with his landlady he sallied out

on a tour of exploration, but he had gone scarcely a block when he became horribly conscious that he must be

the only man in town who was wearing a hat. He returned hurriedly to 12 University, left his derby, and,

emerging bareheaded, loitered down Nassau Street, stopping to investigate a display of athletic photographs

in a store window, including a large one of Allenby, the football captain, and next attracted by the sign

"Jigger Shop" over a confectionary window. This sounded familiar, so he sauntered in and took a seat on a

He munched four of these, finding them of pleasing savor, and then consumed another doublechocolate

jigger before ease descended upon him. After a cursory inspection of the pillowcases, leather pennants, and

Gibson Girls that lined the walls, he left, and continued along Nassau Street with his hands in his pockets.

Gradually he was learning to distinguish between upper classmen and entering men, even though the

freshman cap would not appear until the following Monday. Those who were too obviously, too nervously at

home were freshmen, for as each train brought a new contingent it was immediately absorbed into the hatless,

whiteshod, bookladen throng, whose function seemed to be to drift endlessly up and down the street,

emitting great clouds of smoke from brandnew pipes. By afternoon Amory realized that now the newest

arrivals were taking him for an upper classman, and he tried conscientiously to look both pleasantly blasi and

casually critical, which was as near as he could analyze the prevalent facial expression.

At five o'clock he felt the need of hearing his own voice, so he retreated to his house to see if any one else

had arrived. Having climbed the rickety stairs he scrutinized his room resignedly, concluding that it was

hopeless to attempt any more inspired decoration than class banners and tiger pictures. There was a tap at the

"I thought of the campus," he said, "but they say there's so few freshmen that they're lost. Have to sit around

They shook hands with the fashionable low swoop. Amory grinned. "Where'd you prep?"

They discussed the cousin thoroughly, and then Holiday announced that he was to meet his brother for dinner

At the Kenilworth Amory met Burne Holidayhe of the gray eyes was Kerryand during a limpid meal of thin

soup and anfmic vegetables they stared at the other freshmen, who sat either in small groups looking very ill

"Oh, at Princeton you've got to swallow everything the first year. It's like a damned prep school."

"Lot of pep, though," he insisted. "I wouldn't have gone to Yale for a million."

"Not me Burne here is going out for the Prince the Daily Princetonian, you know."

After supper they attended the movies, where Amory was fascinated by the glib comments of a man in front

A group began whistling "By the Sea," and the audience took it up noisily. This was followed by an

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

"Ohhhhh She works in a Jam Factoree Andthatmaybeallright But you can'tfoolme For I

As they pushed out, giving and receiving curious impersonal glances, Amory decided that he liked the

movies, wanted to enjoy them as the row of upper classmen in front had enjoyed them, with their arms along

the backs of the seats, their comments Gaelic and caustic, their attitude a mixture of critical wit and tolerant

Amory decided to sit for a while on the front steps, so he bade them good night.

The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had

drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon,

swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful. He

remembered that an alumnus of the nineties had told him of one of Booth Tarkington's amusements: standing

in midcampus in the small hours and singing tenor songs to the stars, arousing mingled emotions in the

Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place a whiteclad phalanx broke the gloom, and marching

figures, whiteshirted, whitetrousered, swung rhythmically up the street, with linked arms and heads thrown

Amory closed his eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all dropped out

except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the dangerpoint and relinquished it to the fantastic

chorus. Then Amory opened his eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil the rich illusion of harmony.

He sighed eagerly. There at the head of the white platoon marched Allenby, the football captain, slim and

defiant, as if aware that this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his hundredandsixty pounds

Fascinated, Amory watched each rank of linked arms as it came abreast, the faces indistinct above the polo

shirts, the voices blent in a pfan of triumphand then the procession passed through shadowy Campbell Arch,

The minutes passed and Amory sat there very quietly. He regretted the rule that would forbid freshmen to be

outdoors after curfew, for he wanted to ramble through the shadowy scented lanes, where Witherspoon

brooded like a dark mother over Whig and Clio, her Attic children, where the black Gothic snake of Little

curled down to Cuyler and Patton, these in turn flinging the mystery out over the placid slope rolling to the

Princeton of the daytime filtered slowly into his consciousnessWest and Reunion, redolent of the sixties,

Seventynine Hall, brickred and arrogant, Upper and Lower Pyne, aristocratic Elizabethan ladies not quite

content to live among shopkeepers, and, topping all, climbing with clear blue aspiration, the great dreaming

From the first he loved Princetonits lazy beauty, its halfgrasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the

rushes, the handsome, prosperous biggame crowds, and under it all the air of struggle that pervaded his

class. From the day when, wildeyed and exhausted, the jerseyed freshmen sat in the gymnasium and elected

some one from Hill School class president, a Lawrenceville celebrity vicepresident, a hockey star from St.

Paul's secretary, up until the end of sophomore year it never ceased, that breathless social system, that

First it was schools, and Amory, alone from St. Regis', watched the crowds form and widen and form again;

St. Paul's, Hill, Pomfret, eating at certain tacitly reserved tables in Commons, dressing in their own corners of

the gymnasium, and drawing unconsciously about them a barrier of the slightly less important but socially

ambitious to protect them from the friendly, rather puzzled highschool element. From the moment he

realized this Amory resented social barriers as artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their

Having decided to be one of the gods of the class, he reported for freshman football practice, but in the

second week, playing quarterback, already paragraphed in corners of the Princetonian, he wrenched his

knee seriously enough to put him out for the rest of the season. This forced him to retire and consider the

"12 Univee" housed a dozen miscellaneous questionmarks. There were three or four inconspicuous and

quite startled boys from Lawrenceville, two amateur wild men from a New York private school (Kerry

Holiday christened them the "plebeian drunks"), a Jewish youth, also from New York, and, as compensation

The Holidays were rumored twins, but really the darkhaired one, Kerry, was a year older than his blond

brother, Burne. Kerry was tall, with humorous gray eyes, and a sudden, attractive smile; he became at once

the mentor of the house, reaper of ears that grew too high, censor of conceit, vendor of rare, satirical humor.

Amory spread the table of their future friendship with all his ideas of what college should and did mean.

Kerry, not inclined as yet to take things seriously, chided him gently for being curious at this inopportune

time about the intricacies of the social system, but liked him and was both interested and amused. Burne,

fairhaired, silent, and intent, appeared in the house only as a busy apparition, gliding in quietly at night and

off again in the early morning to get up his work in the libraryhe was out for the Princetonian, competing

furiously against forty others for the coveted first place. In December he came down with diphtheria, and

some one else won the competition, but, returning to college in February, he dauntlessly went after the prize

again. Necessarily, Amory's acquaintance with him was in the way of threeminute chats, walking to and

from lectures, so he failed to penetrate Burne's one absorbing interest and find what lay beneath it.

Amory was far from contented. He missed the place he had won at St. Regis', the being known and admired,

yet Princeton stimulated him, and there were many things ahead calculated to arouse the Machiavelli latent in

him, could he but insert a wedge. The upperclass clubs, concerning which he had pumped a reluctant

graduate during the previous summer, excited his curiosity: Ivy, detached and breathlessly aristocratic;

Cottage, an impressive milange of brilliant adventurers and welldressed philanderers; Tiger Inn,

broadshouldered and athletic, vitalized by an honest elaboration of prepschool standards; Cap and Gown,

antialcoholic, faintly religious and politically powerful; flamboyant Colonial; literary Quadrangle; and the

Anything which brought an under classman into too glaring a light was labelled with the damning brand of

"running it out." The movies thrived on caustic comments, but the men who made them were generally

running it out; talking of clubs was running it out; standing for anything very strongly, as, for instance,

drinking parties or teetotalling, was running it out; in short, being personally conspicuous was not tolerated,

and the influential man was the noncommittal man, until at club elections in sophomore year every one

Amory found that writing for the Nassau Literary Magazine would get him nothing, but that being on the

board of the Daily Princetonian would get any one a good deal. His vague desire to do immortal acting with

the English Dramatic Association faded out when he found that the most ingenious brains and talents were

concentrated upon the Triangle Club, a musical comedy organization that every year took a great Christmas

trip. In the meanwhile, feeling strangely alone and restless in Commons, with new desires and ambitions

stirring in his mind, he let the first term go by between an envy of the embryo successes and a puzzled

fretting with Kerry as to why they were not accepted immediately among the ilite of the class.

Many afternoons they lounged in the windows of 12 Univee and watched the class pass to and from

Commons, noting satellites already attaching themselves to the more prominent, watching the lonely grind

with his hurried step and downcast eye, envying the happy security of the big school groups.

"We're the damned middle class, that's what!" he complained to Kerry one day as he lay stretched out on the

"Well, why not? We came to Princeton so we could feel that way toward the small collegeshave it on 'em,

"Oh, it isn't that I mind the glittering caste system," admitted Amory. "I like having a bunch of hot cats on

"I won't belong," he said finally. "But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I'll show the marks, don't you

"Honorable scars." Kerry craned his neck suddenly at the street. "There's Langueduc, if you want to see what

"Oh," he said, scrutinizing these worthies, "Humbird looks like a knockout, but this Langueduche's the

rugged type, isn't he? I distrust that sort. All diamonds look big in the rough." "Well," said Kerry, as the

"I wonder"Amory paused"if I could be. I honestly think so sometimes. That sounds like the devil, and I

"Wellgo ahead. Let your hair grow and write poems like this guy D'Invilliers in the Lit."

Amory reached lazily at a pile of magazines on the table. "Read his latest effort?"

"'Her toes are stiffened like a stork's in flight; She's laid upon her bed, on the white sheets, Her hands pressed

"My gosh, Kerry, what in hell is it all about? I swear I don't get him at all, and I'm a literary bird myself."

"It's pretty tricky," said Kerry, "only you've got to think of hearses and stale milk when you read it. That isn't

"Well," he sighed, "I sure am up in the air. I know I'm not a regular fellow, yet I loathe anybody else that

isn't. I can't decide whether to cultivate my mind and be a great dramatist, or to thumb my nose at the Golden

"Why decide?" suggested Kerry. "Better drift, like me. I'm going to sail into prominence on Burne's

"I can't driftI want to be interested. I want to pull strings, even for somebody else, or be Princetonian

"No. I'm thinking about you, too. We've got to get out and mix around the class right now, when it's fun to be

a snob. I'd like to bring a sardine to the prom in June, for instance, but I wouldn't do it unless I could be damn

debonaire about itintroduce her to all the prize parlorsnakes, and the football captain, and all that simple

"Amory," said Kerry impatiently, "you're just going around in a circle. If you want to be prominent, get out

and try for something; if you don't, just take it easy." He yawned. "Come on, let's let the smoke drift off.

Amory gradually accepted this point of view, decided that next fall would inaugurate his career, and

They filled the Jewish youth's bed with lemon pie; they put out the gas all over the house every night by

blowing into the jet in Amory's room, to the bewilderment of Mrs. Twelve and the local plumber; they set up

the effects of the plebeian drunkspictures, books, and furniturein the bathroom, to the confusion of the pair,

who hazily discovered the transposition on their return from a Trenton spree; they were disappointed beyond

measure when the plebeian drunks decided to take it as a joke; they played reddog and twentyone and

jackpot from dinner to dawn, and on the occasion of one man's birthday persuaded him to buy sufficient

champagne for a hilarious celebration. The donor of the party having remained sober, Kerry and Amory

accidentally dropped him down two flights of stairs and called, shamefaced and penitent, at the infirmary all

"Say, who are all these women?" demanded Kerry one day, protesting at the size of Amory's mail. "I've been

looking at the postmarks latelyFarmington and Dobbs and Westover and Dana Hallwhat's the idea?"

"All from the Twin Cities." He named them off. "There's Marylyn De Wittshe's pretty, got a car of her own

and that's damn convenient; there's Sally Weatherbyshe's getting too fat; there's Myra St. Claire, she's an old

"What line do you throw 'em?" demanded Kerry. "I've tried everything, and the mad wags aren't even afraid

"That's just it. Mother always feels the girl is safe if she's with me. Honestly, it's annoying. If I start to hold

somebody's hand, they laugh at me, and let me, just as if it wasn't part of them. As soon as I get hold of a

"Sulk," suggested Amory. "Tell 'em you're wild and have 'em reform yougo home furiouscome back in

"No chance. I wrote a St. Timothy girl a really loving letter last year. In one place I got rattled and said: 'My

God, how I love you!' She took a nail scissors, clipped out the 'My God' and showed the rest of the letter all

Amory smiled and tried to picture himself as "good old Amory." He failed completely.

February dripped snow and rain, the cyclonic freshman midyears passed, and life in 12 Univee continued

interesting if not purposeful. Once a day Amory indulged in a club sandwich, cornflakes, and Julienne

potatoes at "Joe's," accompanied usually by Kerry or Alec Connage. The latter was a quiet, rather aloof

slicker from Hotchkiss, who lived next door and shared the same enforced singleness as Amory, due to the

fact that his entire class had gone to Yale. "Joe's" was unfsthetic and faintly unsanitary, but a limitless charge

account could be opened there, a convenience that Amory appreciated. His father had been experimenting

with mining stocks and, in consequence, his allowance, while liberal, was not at all what he had expected.

"Joe's" had the additional advantage of seclusion from curious upperclass eyes, so at four each afternoon

Amory, accompanied by friend or book, went up to experiment with his digestion. One day in March, finding

that all the tables were occupied, he slipped into a chair opposite a freshman who bent intently over a book at

the last table. They nodded briefly. For twenty minutes Amory sat consuming bacon buns and reading "Mrs.

Warren's Profession" (he had discovered Shaw quite by accident while browsing in the library during

midyears); the other freshman, also intent on his volume, meanwhile did away with a trio of chocolate

By and by Amory's eyes wandered curiously to his fellowluncher's book. He spelled out the name and title

upside down"Marpessa," by Stephen Phillips. This meant nothing to him, his metrical education having been

confined to such Sunday classics as "Come into the Garden, Maude," and what morsels of Shakespeare and

Moved to address his vis`avis, he simulated interest in his book for a moment, and then exclaimed aloud as

"Are you referring to your bacon buns?" His cracked, kindly voice went well with the large spectacles and the

"No," Amory answered. "I was referring to Bernard Shaw." He turned the book around in explanation.

"I've never read any Shaw. I've always meant to." The boy paused and then continued: "Did you ever read

"Yes, indeed," Amory affirmed eagerly. "I've never read much of Phillips, though." (He had never heard of

"It's pretty fair, I think. Of course he's a Victorian." They sallied into a discussion of poetry, in the course of

which they introduced themselves, and Amory's companion proved to be none other than "that awful

highbrow, Thomas Parke D'Invilliers," who signed the passionate lovepoems in the Lit. He was, perhaps,

nineteen, with stooped shoulders, pale blue eyes, and, as Amory could tell from his general appearance,

without much conception of social competition and such phenomena of absorbing interest. Still, he liked

books, and it seemed forever since Amory had met any one who did; if only that St. Paul's crowd at the next

table would not mistake him for a bird, too, he would enjoy the encounter tremendously. They didn't seem to

be noticing, so he let himself go, discussed books by the dozensbooks he had read, read about, books he had

never heard of, rattling off lists of titles with the facility of a Brentano's clerk. D'Invilliers was partially taken

in and wholly delighted. In a goodnatured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly

Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet

"Oh, surely." A faint chord was struck in Amory's memory. "Wasn't the comic opera, 'Patience,' written about

"Yes, that's the fella. I've just finished a book of his, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray,' and I certainly wish you'd

Amory hesitated, glanced at the St. Paul's groupone of them was the magnificent, exquisite Humbirdand he

considered how determinate the addition of this friend would be. He never got to the stage of making them

and getting rid of themhe was not hard enough for thatso he measured Thomas Parke D'Invilliers' undoubted

attractions and value against the menace of cold eyes behind tortoiserimmed spectacles that he fancied

So he found "Dorian Gray" and the "Mystic and Somber Dolores" and the "Belle Dame sans Merci"; for a

month was keen on naught else. The world became pale and interesting, and he tried hard to look at Princeton

through the satiated eyes of Oscar Wilde and Swinburneor "Fingal O'Flaherty" and "Algernon Charles," as he

called them in pricieuse jest. He read enormously every nightShaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge,

Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, Sudermann, Robert Hugh Benson, the Savoy Operasjust a

heterogeneous mixture, for he suddenly discovered that he had read nothing for years.

Tom D'Invilliers became at first an occasion rather than a friend. Amory saw him about once a week, and

together they gilded the ceiling of Tom's room and decorated the walls with imitation tapestry, bought at an

auction, tall candlesticks and figured curtains. Amory liked him for being clever and literary without

effeminacy or affectation. In fact, Amory did most of the strutting and tried painfully to make every remark

an epigram, than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams, there are many feats harder. 12 Univee

was amused. Kerry read "Dorian Gray" and simulated Lord Henry, following Amory about, addressing him

as "Dorian" and pretending to encourage in him wicked fancies and attenuated tendencies to ennui. When he

carried it into Commons, to the amazement of the others at table, Amory became furiously embarrassed, and

One day Tom and Amory tried reciting their own and Lord Dunsany's poems to the music of Kerry's

Amory, who was performing, looked annoyed, and claimed that he needed a record with less piano in it.

"Put on 'Hearts and Flowers'!" he howled. "Oh, my Lord, I'm going to cast a kitten."

"Shut off the damn graphophone," Amory cried, rather red in the face. "I'm not giving an exhibition."

In the meanwhile Amory delicately kept trying to awaken a sense of the social system in D'Invilliers, for he

knew that this poet was really more conventional than he, and needed merely watered hair, a smaller range of

conversation, and a darker brown hat to become quite regular. But the liturgy of Livingstone collars and dark

ties fell on heedless ears; in fact D'Invilliers faintly resented his efforts; so Amory confined himself to calls

once a week, and brought him occasionally to 12 Univee. This caused mild titters among the other freshmen,

Alec Connage, another frequent visitor, liked him in a vague way, but was afraid of him as a highbrow.

Kerry, who saw through his poetic patter to the solid, almost respectable depths within, was immensely

amused and would have him recite poetry by the hour, while he lay with closed eyes on Amory's sofa and

listened: "Asleep or waking is it? for her neck Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck Wherein the

"That's good," Kerry would say softly. "It pleases the elder Holiday. That's a great poet, I guess." Tom,

delighted at an audience, would ramble through the "Poems and Ballades" until Kerry and Amory knew them

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while

swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the

willows. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through

The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below

them, so that the dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the day like

ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls and cloisters were

infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint

squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarterhour, and Amory, pausing

by the sundial, stretched himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the

flight of timetime that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the

long spring twilights. Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy

beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to

the gray walls and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages. The tower that in view

of his window sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible

against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the transiency and unimportance of the campus figures

except as holders of the apostolic succession. He liked knowing that Gothic architecture, with its upward

trend, was peculiarly appropriate to universities, and the idea became personal to him. The silent stretches of

green, the quiet halls with an occasional lateburning scholastic light held his imagination in a strong grasp,

"Damn it all," he whispered aloud, wetting his hands in the damp and running them through his hair. "Next

year I work!" Yet he knew that where now the spirit of spires and towers made him dreamily acquiescent, it

would then overawe him. Where now he realized only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware

The college dreamed onawake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow

heart. It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left

A belated freshman, his oilskin slicker rasping loudly, slushed along the soft path. A voice from somewhere

called the inevitable formula, "Stick out your head!" below an unseen window. A hundred little sounds of the

"Oh, God!" he cried suddenly, and started at the sound of his voice in the stillness. The rain dripped on. A

minute longer he lay without moving, his hands clinched. Then he sprang to his feet and gave his clothes a

The war began in the summer following his freshman year. Beyond a sporting interest in the German dash for

Paris the whole affair failed either to thrill or interest him. With the attitude he might have held toward an

amusing melodrama he hoped it would be long and bloody. If it had not continued he would have felt like an

The coach fumed helplessly, the Triangle Club president, glowering with anxiety, varied between furious

bursts of authority and fits of temperamental lassitude, when he sat spiritless and wondered how the devil the

The ponies took last drags at their cigarettes and slumped into place; the leading lady rushed into the

foreground, setting his hands and feet in an atmospheric mince; and as the coach clapped and stamped and

tumped and dada'd, they hashed out a dance. A great, seething anthill was the Triangle Club. It gave a

musical comedy every year, travelling with cast, chorus, orchestra, and scenery all through Christmas

vacation. The play and music were the work of undergraduates, and the club itself was the most influential of

Amory, after an easy victory in the first sophomore Princetonian competition, stepped into a vacancy of the

cast as Boiling Oil, a Pirate Lieutenant. Every night for the last week they had rehearsed "HaHa Hortense!"

in the Casino, from two in the afternoon until eight in the morning, sustained by dark and powerful coffee,

and sleeping in lectures through the interim. A rare scene, the Casino. A big, barnlike auditorium, dotted with

boys as girls, boys as pirates, boys as babies; the scenery in course of being violently set up; the spotlight

man rehearsing by throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over all the constant tuning of the orchestra or the

cheerful tumptytump of a Triangle tune. The boy who writes the lyrics stands in the corner, biting a pencil,

with twenty minutes to think of an encore; the business manager argues with the secretary as to how much

money can be spent on "those damn milkmaid costumes"; the old graduate, president in ninetyeight, perches

How a Triangle show ever got off was a mystery, but it was a riotous mystery, anyway, whether or not one

did enough service to wear a little gold Triangle on his watchchain. "HaHa Hortense!" was written over six

times and had the names of nine collaborators on the programme. All Triangle shows started by being

"something differentnot just a regular musical comedy," but when the several authors, the president, the

coach and the faculty committee finished with it, there remained just the old reliable Triangle show with the

old reliable jokes and the star comedian who got expelled or sick or something just before the trip, and the

darkwhiskered man in the ponyballet, who "absolutely won't shave twice a day, doggone it!"

There was one brilliant place in "HaHa Hortense!" It is a Princeton tradition that whenever a Yale man who

is a member of the widely advertised "Skull and Bones" hears the sacred name mentioned, he must leave the

room. It is also a tradition that the members are invariably successful in later life, amassing fortunes or votes

or coupons or whatever they choose to amass. Therefore, at each performance of "HaHa Hortense!"

halfadozen seats were kept from sale and occupied by six of the worstlooking vagabonds that could be

hired from the streets, further touched up by the Triangle makeup man. At the moment in the show where

Firebrand, the Pirate Chief, pointed at his black flag and said, "I am a Yale graduatenot my Skull and

Bones!"at this very moment the six vagabonds were instructed to rise conspicuously and leave the theatre

with looks of deep melancholy and an injured dignity. It was claimed though never proved that on one

They played through vacation to the fashionable of eight cities. Amory liked Louisville and Memphis best:

these knew how to meet strangers, furnished extraordinary punch, and flaunted an astonishing array of

feminine beauty. Chicago he approved for a certain verve that transcended its loud accenthowever, it was a

Yale town, and as the Yale Glee Club was expected in a week the Triangle received only divided homage. In

Baltimore, Princeton was at home, and every one fell in love. There was a proper consumption of strong

waters all along the line; one man invariably went on the stage highly stimulated, claiming that his particular

interpretation of the part required it. There were three private cars; however, no one slept except in the third

car, which was called the "animal car," and where were herded the spectacled windjammers of the orchestra.

Everything was so hurried that there was no time to be bored, but when they arrived in Philadelphia, with

vacation nearly over, there was rest in getting out of the heavy atmosphere of flowers and greasepaint, and

When the disbanding came, Amory set out posthaste for Minneapolis, for Sally Weatherby's cousin, Isabelle

Borgi, was coming to spend the winter in Minneapolis while her parents went abroad. He remembered

Isabelle only as a little girl with whom he had played sometimes when he first went to Minneapolis. She had

Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant. Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had

known as a child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without compunction he wired his

mother not to expect him ... sat in the train, and thought about himself for thirtysix hours.

On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with that great current American phenomenon,

the "petting party." None of the Victorian mothersand most of the mothers were Victorianhad any idea

how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed. "Servantgirls are that way," says Mrs.

HustonCarmelite to her popular daughter. "They are kissed first and proposed to afterward."

But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between sixteen and twentytwo, when she

arranges a match with young Hambell, of Cambell Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love,

and between engagements the P. D. (she is selected by the cutin system at dances, which favors the survival

of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.

Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: eating threeo'clock,

afterdance suppers in impossible cafis, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, half of

mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a real moral letdown. But he never

realized how widespread it was until he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile

intrigue. Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and faint drums downstairs ... they

strut and fret in the lobby, taking another cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then the swinging doors

revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The theatre comes afterward; then a table at the Midnight Frolicof

course, mother will be along there, but she will serve only to make things more secretive and brilliant as she

sits in solitary state at the deserted table and thinks such entertainments as this are not half so bad as they are

painted, only rather wearying. But the P. D. is in love again ... it was odd, wasn't it?that though there was so

much room left in the taxi the P. D. and the boy from Williams were somehow crowded out and had to go in

a separate car. Odd! Didn't you notice how flushed the P. D. was when she arrived just seven minutes late?

The "belle" had become the "flirt," the "flirt" had become the "baby vamp." The "belle" had five or six callers

every afternoon. If the P. D., by some strange accident, has two, it is made pretty uncomfortable for the one

who hasn't a date with her. The "belle" was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermissions between dances.

The same girl ... deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the questioning of moral codes. Amory found it

rather fascinating to feel that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite possibly kiss before twelve.

"Why on earth are we here?" he asked the girl with the green combs one night as they sat in some one's

"Let's be frankwe'll never see each other again. I wanted to come out here with you because I thought you

were the bestlooking girl in sight. You really don't care whether you ever see me again, do you?"

"And you didn't feel tired dancing or want a cigarette or any of the things you said? You just wanted to be"

"Oh, let's go in," she interrupted, "if you want to analyze. Let's not talk about it."

When the handknit, sleeveless jerseys were stylish, Amory, in a burst of inspiration, named them "petting

shirts." The name travelled from coast to coast on the lips of parlorsnakes and P. D.'s.

Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, but not conventionally,

handsome. He had rather a young face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the penetrating green

eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often

accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather a mental thing, and it was not in his

power to turn it on and off like a waterfaucet. But people never forgot his face.

She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed to divers on springboards, leading ladies on

opening nights, and lumpy, husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded through her. She should

have descended to a burst of drums or a discordant blend of themes from "Thais" and "Carmen." She had

never been so curious about her appearance, she had never been so satisfied with it. She had been sixteen

"I had to send back to the house for another pair of slippers. It'll be just a minute."

Isabelle started toward the dressingroom for a last peek in the mirror, but something decided her to stand

there and gaze down the broad stairs of the Minnehaha Club. They curved tantalizingly, and she could catch

just a glimpse of two pairs of masculine feet in the hall below. Pumpshod in uniform black, they gave no

hint of identity, but she wondered eagerly if one pair were attached to Amory Blaine. This young man, not as

yet encountered, had nevertheless taken up a considerable part of her daythe first day of her arrival. Coming

up in the machine from the station, Sally had volunteered, amid a rain of question, comment, revelation, and

"You remember Amory Blaine, of course. Well, he's simply mad to see you again. He's stayed over a day

from college, and he's coming tonight. He's heard so much about yousays he remembers your eyes."

This had pleased Isabelle. It put them on equal terms, although she was quite capable of staging her own

romances, with or without advance advertising. But following her happy tremble of anticipation, came a

sinking sensation that made her ask: "How do you mean he's heard about me? What sort of things?" Sally

smiled. She felt rather in the capacity of a showman with her more exotic cousin.

"He knows you'reyou're considered beautiful and all that"she paused"and I guess he knows you've been

At this Isabelle's little fist had clinched suddenly under the fur robe. She was accustomed to be thus followed

by her desperate past, and it never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of resentment; yetin a strange town

it was an advantageous reputation. She was a "Speed," was she? Welllet them find out. Out of the window

Isabelle watched the snow glide by in the frosty morning. It was ever so much colder here than in Baltimore;

she had not remembered; the glass of the side door was iced, the windows were shirred with snow in the

corners. Her mind played still with one subject. Did he dress like that boy there, who walked calmly down a

bustling business street, in moccasins and wintercarnival costume? How very Western! Of course he wasn't

that way: he went to Princeton, was a sophomore or something. Really she had no distinct idea of him. An

ancient snapshot she had preserved in an old kodak book had impressed her by the big eyes (which he had

probably grown up to by now). However, in the last month, when her winter visit to Sally had been decided

on, he had assumed the proportions of a worthy adversary. Children, most astute of matchmakers, plot their

campaigns quickly, and Sally had played a clever correspondence sonata to Isabelle's excitable temperament.

Isabelle had been for some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions.... They drew up at a

spreading, whitestone building, set back from the snowy street. Mrs. Weatherby greeted her warmly and her

various younger cousins were produced from the corners where they skulked politely. Isabelle met them

tactfully. At her best she allied all with whom she came in contactexcept older girls and some women. All the

impressions she made were conscious. The halfdozen girls she renewed acquaintance with that morning

were all rather impressed and as much by her direct personality as by her reputation. Amory Blaine was an

open subject. Evidently a bit light of love, neither popular nor unpopularevery girl there seemed to have had

an affair with him at some time or other, but no one volunteered any really useful information. He was going

to fall for her.... Sally had published that information to her young set and they were retailing it back to Sally

as fast as they set eyes on Isabelle. Isabelle resolved secretly that she would, if necessary, force herself to like

himshe owed it to Sally. Suppose she were terribly disappointed. Sally had painted him in such glowing

colorshe was goodlooking, "sort of distinguished, when he wants to be," had a line, and was properly

inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire. She

wondered if those were his dancingshoes that foxtrotted tentatively around the soft rug below.

All impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely kaleidoscopic to Isabelle. She had that curious mixture

of the social and the artistic temperaments found often in two classes, society women and actresses. Her

education or, rather, her sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled on her favor; her

tact was instinctive, and her capacity for loveaffairs was limited only by the number of the susceptible

within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large blackbrown eyes and shone through her intense

So she waited at the head of the stairs that evening while slippers were fetched. Just as she was growing

impatient, Sally came out of the dressingroom, beaming with her accustomed good nature and high spirits,

and together they descended to the floor below, while the shifting searchlight of Isabelle's mind flashed on

two ideas: she was glad she had high color tonight, and she wondered if he danced well.

Downstairs, in the club's great room, she was surrounded for a moment by the girls she had met in the

afternoon, then she heard Sally's voice repeating a cycle of names, and found herself bowing to a sextet of

black and white, terribly stiff, vaguely familiar figures. The name Blaine figured somewhere, but at first she

could not place him. A very confused, very juvenile moment of awkward backings and bumpings followed,

and every one found himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabelle manoeuvred herself and Froggy

Parker, freshman at Harvard, with whom she had once played hopscotch, to a seat on the stairs. A humorous

reference to the past was all she needed. The things Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable.

First, she repeated it rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto with a soupgon of Southern accent; then she held

it off at a distance and smiled at ither wonderful smile; then she delivered it in variations and played a sort of

mental catch with it, all this in the nominal form of dialogue. Froggy was fascinated and quite unconscious

that this was being done, not for him, but for the green eyes that glistened under the shining carefully watered

hair, a little to her left, for Isabelle had discovered Amory. As an actress even in the fullest flush of her own

conscious magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the front row, so Isabelle sized up her

antagonist. First, he had auburn hair, and from her feeling of disappointment she knew that she had expected

him to be dark and of garteradvertisement slenderness.... For the rest, a faint flush and a straight, romantic

profile; the effect set off by a closefitting dress suit and a silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women still

There was a stir, and Sally led the way over to their table. Amory struggled to Isabelle's side, and whispered:

Isabelle gaspedthis was rather right in line. But really she felt as if a good speech had been taken from the

star and given to a minor character.... She mustn't lose the leadership a bit. The dinnertable glittered with

laughter at the confusion of getting places and then curious eyes were turned on her, sitting near the head. She

was enjoying this immensely, and Froggy Parker was so engrossed with the added sparkle of her rising color

that he forgot to pull out Sally's chair, and fell into a dim confusion. Amory was on the other side, full of

confidence and vanity, gazing at her in open admiration. He began directly, and so did Froggy:

Both stopped. Isabelle turned to Amory shyly. Her face was always enough answer for any one, but she

"From everybodyfor all the years since you've been away." She blushed appropriately. On her right Froggy

"I'll tell you what I remembered about you all these years," Amory continued. She leaned slightly toward him

and looked modestly at the celery before her. Froggy sighedhe knew Amory, and the situations that Amory

seemed born to handle. He turned to Sally and asked her if she was going away to school next year. Amory

"I've got an adjective that just fits you." This was one of his favorite startshe seldom had a word in mind, but

it was a curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something complimentary if he got in a tight corner.

"Ohwhat?" Isabelle's face was a study in enraptured curiosity. Amory shook his head.

"Did any one ever tell you, you have keen eyes?" she said. Amory attempted to make them look even keener.

He fancied, but he was not sure, that her foot had just touched his under the table. But it might possibly have

been only the table leg. It was so hard to tell. Still it thrilled him. He wondered quickly if there would be any

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur

standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal

study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest

was the result of accessible popular novels and dressingroom conversation culled from a slightly older set.

Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed

the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the

same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of

blasi sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his

poseit was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He was aware that he was getting this

particular favor now because she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best game in sight,

and that he would have to improve his opportunity before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an

After the dinner the dance began ... smoothly. Smoothly?boys cut in on Isabelle every few feet and then

squabbled in the corners with: "You might let me get more than an inch!" and "She didn't like it eithershe told

me so next time I cut in." It was trueshe told every one so, and gave every hand a parting pressure that said:

"You know that your dances are making my evening." But time passed, two hours of it, and the less subtle

beaux had better learned to focus their pseudopassionate glances elsewhere, for eleven o'clock found

Isabelle and Amory sitting on the couch in the little den off the readingroom upstairs. She was conscious

that they were a handsome pair, and seemed to belong distinctively in this seclusion, while lesser lights

Boys who passed the door looked in enviouslygirls who passed only laughed and frowned and grew wise

They had now reached a very definite stage. They had traded accounts of their progress since they had met

last, and she had listened to much she had heard before. He was a sophomore, was on the Princetonian board,

hoped to be chairman in senior year. He learned that some of the boys she went with in Baltimore were

"terrible speeds" and came to dances in states of artificial stimulation; most of them were twenty or so, and

drove alluring red Stutzes. A good half seemed to have already flunked out of various schools and colleges,

but some of them bore athletic names that made him look at her admiringly. As a matter of fact, Isabelle's

closer acquaintance with the universities was just commencing. She had bowing acquaintance with a lot of

young men who thought she was a "pretty kidworth keeping an eye on." But Isabelle strung the names into a

fabrication of gayety that would have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young contralto

He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was a difference between conceit and

Amory denied this painfully. However, he sized up several people for her. Then they talked about hands.

"You've got awfully nice hands," she said. "They look as if you played the piano. Do you?"

I have said they had reached a very definite stagenay, more, a very critical stage. Amory had stayed over a

day to see her, and his train left at twelveeighteen that night. His trunk and suitcase awaited him at the

"Isabelle," he said suddenly, "I want to tell you something." They had been talking lightly about "that funny

look in her eyes," and Isabelle knew from the change in his manner what was comingindeed, she had been

wondering how soon it would come. Amory reached above their heads and turned out the electric light, so

that they were in the dark, except for the red glow that fell through the door from the readingroom lamps.

"I don't know whether or not you know what youwhat I'm going to say. Lordy, Isabellethis sounds like a

"Maybe we'll never meet again like thisI have darned hard luck sometimes." He was leaning away from her

on the other arm of the lounge, but she could see his eyes plainly in the dark. "You'll meet me againsilly."

There was just the slightest emphasis on the last wordso that it became almost a term of endearment. He

"I've fallen for a lot of peoplegirlsand I guess you have, tooboys, I mean, but, honestly, you" he broke off

suddenly and leaned forward, chin on his hands: "Oh, what's the useyou'll go your way and I suppose I'll go

Silence for a moment. Isabelle was quite stirred; she wound her handkerchief into a tight ball, and by the faint

light that streamed over her, dropped it deliberately on the floor. Their hands touched for an instant, but

neither spoke. Silences were becoming more frequent and more delicious. Outside another stray couple had

come up and were experimenting on the piano in the next room. After the usual preliminary of "chopsticks,"

one of them started "Babes in the Woods" and a light tenor carried the words into the den:

Isabelle hummed it softly and trembled as she felt Amory's hand close over hers.

"Isabelle," he whispered. "You know I'm mad about you. You do give a darn about me."

"No." He could scarcely hear her, although he bent so near that he felt her breath against his cheek.

"Isabelle, I'm going back to college for six long months, and why shouldn't weif I could only just have one

"Close the door...." Her voice had just stirred so that he half wondered whether she had spoken at all. As he

What a wonderful song, she thoughteverything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the

den, with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life

seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of

warm limousines and in low, cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering treesonly the boy might change, and

this one was so nice. He took her hand softly. With a sudden movement he turned it and, holding it to his lips,

"Isabelle!" His whisper blended in the music, and they seemed to float nearer together. Her breath came

faster. "Can't I kiss you, IsabelleIsabelle?" Lips half parted, she turned her head to him in the dark. Suddenly

the ring of voices, the sound of running footsteps surged toward them. Quick as a flash Amory reached up

and turned on the light, and when the door opened and three boys, the wrathy and dancecraving Froggy

among them, rushed in, he was turning over the magazines on the table, while she sat without moving, serene

and unembarrassed, and even greeted them with a welcoming smile. But her heart was beating wildly, and

It was evidently over. There was a clamor for a dance, there was a glance that passed between themon his

side despair, on hers regret, and then the evening went on, with the reassured beaux and the eternal cutting in.

At quarter to twelve Amory shook hands with her gravely, in the midst of a small crowd assembled to wish

him goodspeed. For an instant he lost his poise, and she felt a bit rattled when a satirical voice from a

"Take her outside, Amory!" As he took her hand he pressed it a little, and she returned the pressure as she had

At two o'clock back at the Weatherbys' Sally asked her if she and Amory had had a "time" in the den. Isabelle

turned to her quietly. In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate dreamer of Joanlike dreams.

"No," she answered. "I don't do that sort of thing any more; he asked me to, but I said no."

As she crept in bed she wondered what he'd say in his special delivery tomorrow. He had such a

"Fourteen angels were watching o'er them," sang Sally sleepily from the next room.

"Damn!" muttered Isabelle, punching the pillow into a luxurious lump and exploring the cold sheets

Amory, by way of the Princetonian, had arrived. The minor snobs, finely balanced thermometers of success,

warmed to him as the club elections grew nigh, and he and Tom were visited by groups of upper classmen

who arrived awkwardly, balanced on the edge of the furniture and talked of all subjects except the one of

absorbing interest. Amory was amused at the intent eyes upon him, and, in case the visitors represented some

club in which he was not interested, took great pleasure in shocking them with unorthodox remarks.

"Oh, let me see" he said one night to a flabbergasted delegation, "what club do you represent?"

With visitors from Ivy and Cottage and Tiger Inn he played the "nice, unspoilt, ingenuous boy" very much at

When the fatal morning arrived, early in March, and the campus became a document in hysteria, he slid

smoothly into Cottage with Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with much wonder.

There were fickle groups that jumped from club to club; there were friends of two or three days who

announced tearfully and wildly that they must join the same club, nothing should separate them; there were

snarling disclosures of longhidden grudges as the Suddenly Prominent remembered snubs of freshman year.

Unknown men were elevated into importance when they received certain coveted bids; others who were

considered "all set" found that they had made unexpected enemies, felt themselves stranded and deserted,

In his own crowd Amory saw men kept out for wearing green hats, for being "a damn tailor's dummy," for

having "too much pull in heaven," for getting drunk one night "not like a gentleman, by God," or for

unfathomable secret reasons known to no one but the wielders of the black balls.

This orgy of sociability culminated in a gigantic party at the Nassau Inn, where punch was dispensed from

immense bowls, and the whole downstairs became a delirious, circulating, shouting pattern of faces and

"Oh, KerryI hear you went Tiger with all the weightlifters!" "Well, I didn't go Cottagethe parlorsnakes'

"They say Overton fainted when he got his Ivy bid Did he sign up the first day?oh, no. Tore over to

"'Gratulations yourself. Hear you got a good crowd." When the bar closed, the party broke up into groups and

streamed, singing, over the snowclad campus, in a weird delusion that snobbishness and strain were over at

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune

with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen newfound friendships

Alec Connage came into his room one morning and woke him up into the sunshine and peculiar glory of

"Wake up, Original Sin, and scrape yourself together. Be in front of Renwick's in half an hour. Somebody's

got a car." He took the bureau cover and carefully deposited it, with its load of small articles, upon the bed.

"Sacred trust, but don't be a critical goopher or you can't go!" "I think I'll sleep," Amory said calmly,

With a bound Amory was out of bed, scattering the bureau cover's burden on the floor. The coast ... he hadn't

"Who's going?" he demanded as he wriggled into his B. V. D.'s. "Oh, Dick Humbird and Kerry Holiday and

In ten minutes Amory was devouring cornflakes in Renwick's, and at ninethirty they bowled happily out of

"You see," said Kerry, "the car belongs down there. In fact, it was stolen from Asbury Park by persons

unknown, who deserted it in Princeton and left for the West. Heartless Humbird here got permission from the

"Anybody got any money?" suggested Ferrenby, turning around from the front seat.

"Honestly," answered Kerry, eying him reprovingly, "do you doubt Kerry's ability for three short days? Some

people have lived on nothing for years at a time. Read the Boy Scout Monthly." "Three days," Amory mused,

"Just the same, I can only cut six more classes, with over a month and a half to go."

"Amory, you're running it out, if I may coin a new phrase." "Hadn't you better get some dope on yourself,

Amory?" Amory subsided resignedly and drooped into a contemplation of the scenery. Swinburne seemed to

"What's the matter, Amory? Amory's thinking about poetry, about the pretty birds and flowers. I can see it in

his eye." "No, I'm not," he lied. "I'm thinking about the Princetonian. I ought to make up tonight; but I can

telephone back, I suppose." "Oh," said Kerry respectfully, "these important men"

Amory flushed and it seemed to him that Ferrenby, a defeated competitor, winced a little. Of course, Kerry

It was a halcyon day, and as they neared the shore and the salt breezes scurried by, he began to picture the

ocean and long, level stretches of sand and red roofs over blue sea. Then they hurried through the little town

"Let me out, quickI haven't seen it for eight years! Oh, gentlefolk, stop the car!"

The car was obligingly drawn up at a curb, and Amory ran for the boardwalk. First, he realized that the sea

was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roaredreally all the banalities

about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he

"Now we'll get lunch," ordered Kerry, wandering up with the crowd. "Come on, Amory, tear yourself away

and get practical." "We'll try the best hotel first," he went on, "and thence and so forth."

They strolled along the boardwalk to the most imposing hostelry in sight, and, entering the diningroom,

"Eight Bronxes," commanded Alec, "and a club sandwich and Juliennes. The food for one. Hand the rest

Amory ate little, having seized a chair where he could watch the sea and feel the rock of it. When luncheon

"Rotten overcharge. We'll give them two dollars and one for the waiter. Kerry, collect the small change."

The waiter approached, and Kerry gravely handed him a dollar, tossed two dollars on the check, and turned

away. They sauntered leisurely toward the door, pursued in a moment by the suspicious Ganymede.

"No mistake!" he said, shaking his head gravely, and, tearing it into four pieces, he handed the scraps to the

waiter, who was so dumfounded that he stood motionless and expressionless while they walked out.

"No," said Kerry; "for a minute he'll think we're the proprietor's sons or something; then he'll look at the

They left the car at Asbury and streetcar'd to Allenhurst, where they investigated the crowded pavilions for

beauty. At four there were refreshments in a lunchroom, and this time they paid an even smaller per cent on

the total cost; something about the appearance and savoirfaire of the crowd made the thing go, and they

"You see, Amory, we're Marxian Socialists," explained Kerry. "We don't believe in property and we're

They became jovial about fivethirty and, linking arms, strolled up and down the boardwalk in a row,

chanting a monotonous ditty about the sad sea waves. Then Kerry saw a face in the crowd that attracted him

and, rushing off, reappeared in a moment with one of the homeliest girls Amory had ever set eyes on. Her

pale mouth extended from ear to ear, her teeth projected in a solid wedge, and she had little, squinty eyes that

peeped ingratiatingly over the side sweep of her nose. Kerry presented them formally. "Name of Kaluka,

Hawaiian queen! Let me present Messrs. Connage, Sloane, Humbird, Ferrenby, and Blaine."

The girl bobbed courtesies all around. Poor creature; Amory supposed she had never before been noticed in

her lifepossibly she was halfwitted. While she accompanied them (Kerry had invited her to supper) she said

"She prefers her native dishes," said Alec gravely to the waiter, "but any coarse food will do."

All through supper he addressed her in the most respectful language, while Kerry made idiotic love to her on

the other side, and she giggled and grinned. Amory was content to sit and watch the byplay, thinking what a

light touch Kerry had, and how he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour. They

all seemed to have the spirit of it more or less, and it was a relaxation to be with them. Amory usually liked

men individually, yet feared them in crowds unless the crowd was around him. He wondered how much each

one contributed to the party, for there was somewhat of a spiritual tax levied. Alec and Kerry were the life of

it, but not quite the centre. Somehow the quiet Humbird, and Sloane, with his impatient superciliousness,

Dick Humbird had, ever since freshman year, seemed to Amory a perfect type of aristocrat. He was slender

but wellbuiltblack curly hair, straight features, and rather a dark skin. Everything he said sounded intangibly

appropriate. He possessed infinite courage, an averagely good mind, and a sense of honor with a clear charm

and noblesse oblige that varied it from righteousness. He could dissipate without going to pieces, and even

his most bohemian adventures never seemed "running it out." People dressed like him, tried to talk as he

did.... Amory decided that he probably held the world back, but he wouldn't have changed him....

He differed from the healthy type that was essentially middle classhe never seemed to perspire. Some people

couldn't be familiar with a chauffeur without having it returned; Humbird could have lunched at Sherry's with

a colored man, yet people would have somehow known that it was all right. He was not a snob, though he

knew only half his class. His friends ranged from the highest to the lowest, but it was impossible to

"cultivate" him. Servants worshipped him, and treated him like a god. He seemed the eternal example of what

the upper class tries to be. "He's like those pictures in the Illustrated London News of the English officers

who have been killed," Amory had said to Alec. "Well," Alec had answered, "if you want to know the

shocking truth, his father was a grocery clerk who made a fortune in Tacoma real estate and came to New

This present type of party was made possible by the surging together of the class after club electionsas if to

make a last desperate attempt to know itself, to keep together, to fight off the tightening spirit of the clubs. It

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The

evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste

Ten o'clock found them penniless. They had suppered greatly on their last eleven cents and, singing, strolled

up through the casinos and lighted arches on the boardwalk, stopping to listen approvingly to all band

concerts. In one place Kerry took up a collection for the French War Orphans which netted a dollar and

twenty cents, and with this they bought some brandy in case they caught cold in the night. They finished the

day in a movingpicture show and went into solemn systematic roars of laughter at an ancient comedy, to the

startled annoyance of the rest of the audience. Their entrance was distinctly strategic, for each man as he

entered pointed reproachfully at the one just behind him. Sloane, bringing up the rear, disclaimed all

knowledge and responsibility as soon as the others were scattered inside; then as the irate tickettaker rushed

They reassembled later by the Casino and made arrangements for the night. Kerry wormed permission from

the watchman to sleep on the platform and, having collected a huge pile of rugs from the booths to serve as

mattresses and blankets, they talked until midnight, and then fell into a dreamless sleep, though Amory tried

So they progressed for two happy days, up and down the shore by streetcar or machine, or by shoeleather

on the crowded boardwalk; sometimes eating with the wealthy, more frequently dining frugally at the

expense of an unsuspecting restaurateur. They had their photos taken, eight poses, in a quickdevelopment

store. Kerry insisted on grouping them as a "varsity" football team, and then as a tough gang from the East

Side, with their coats inside out, and himself sitting in the middle on a cardboard moon. The photographer

probably has them yetat least, they never called for them. The weather was perfect, and again they slept

outside, and again Amory fell unwillingly asleep. Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea

seemed to mumble and complain, so they returned to Princeton via the Fords of transient farmers, and broke

Even more than in the year before, Amory neglected his work, not deliberately but lazily and through a

multitude of other interests. Coordinate geometry and the melancholy hexameters of Corneille and Racine

held forth small allurements, and even psychology, which he had eagerly awaited, proved to be a dull subject

full of muscular reactions and biological phrases rather than the study of personality and influence. That was

a noon class, and it always sent him dozing. Having found that "subjective and objective, sir," answered most

of the questions, he used the phrase on all occasions, and it became the class joke when, on a query being

Mostly there were partiesto Orange or the Shore, more rarely to New York and Philadelphia, though one

night they marshalled fourteen waitresses out of Childs' and took them to ride down Fifth Avenue on top of

an auto bus. They all cut more classes than were allowed, which meant an additional course the following

year, but spring was too rare to let anything interfere with their colorful ramblings. In May Amory was

elected to the Sophomore Prom Committee, and when after a long evening's discussion with Alec they made

out a tentative list of class probabilities for the senior council, they placed themselves among the surest. The

senior council was composed presumably of the eighteen most representative seniors, and in view of Alec's

football managership and Amory's chance of nosing out Burne Holiday as Princetonian chairman, they

seemed fairly justified in this presumption. Oddly enough, they both placed D'Invilliers as among the

All through the spring Amory had kept up an intermittent correspondence with Isabelle Borgi, punctuated by

violent squabbles and chiefly enlivened by his attempts to find new words for love. He discovered Isabelle to

be discreetly and aggravatingly unsentimental in letters, but he hoped against hope that she would prove not

too exotic a bloom to fit the large spaces of spring as she had fitted the den in the Minnehaha Club. During

May he wrote thirtypage documents almost nightly, and sent them to her in bulky envelopes exteriorly

"Oh, Alec, I believe I'm tired of college," he said sadly, as they walked the dusk together.

"All I'd like would be a little home in the country, some warm country, and a wife, and just enough to do to

"Oh!" Amory gasped in horror. "She wouldn't think of marrying ... that is, not now. I mean the future, you

"Yes. Don't say a word to anybody, please, but I am. I may not come back next year."

"Yes," Amory interrupted, "but I was just wishing. I wouldn't think of leaving college. It's just that I feel so

sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they're never coming again, and I'm not really getting all I could out

of them. I wish my girl lived here. But marrynot a chance. Especially as father says the money isn't

But Amory sighed and made use of the nights. He had a snapshot of Isabelle, enshrined in an old watch, and

at eight almost every night he would turn off all the lights except the desk lamp and, sitting by the open

...Oh it's so hard to write you what I really fell when I think about you so much; you've gotten to mean to me

a dream that I can't put on paper any more. Your last letter came and it was wonderful! I read it over about six

times, especially the last part, but I do wish, sometimes, you'd be more frank and tell me what you really do

think of me, yet your last letter was too good to be true, and I can hardly wait until June! Be cure and be able

to come to the prom. It"ll be fine, I think, and I want to bring you just at the end of a wonderful year. I often

think over what you said on that night and wonder how much you ment. If it were anyone but youbut you

see I thought you were fickle the first time I say you and you are so popular and everthing that I can't imagine

...Oh, Isabelle, dearit's a wonderful night. Somebody is playing "Love Moon" on a mandolin far across the

campus, and the music seems to bring you into the window. Now he's playing "Goodby, Boys, I'm

Through," and how well it suits me. For I am through with everything. I have decided never to take a cocktail

again, and I know I'll never again fall in loveI couldn'tyou've been too much a part of my days and nights to

ever let me think of another girl. I meet them all the time and they don't interest me. I'm not pretending to be

blasi, because it's not that. It's just that I'm in love. Oh, dearest Isabelle (somehow I can't call you just

Isabelle, and I'm afraid I'll come out with the "dearest" before your family this June), you've got to come to

the prom, and then I'll come up to your house for a day and everything'll be perfect....

And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them infinitely charming, infinitely new.

June came and the days grew so hot and lazy that they could not worry even about exams, but spent dreamy

evenings on the court of Cottage, talking of long subjects until the sweep of country toward Stony Brook

became a blue haze and the lilacs were white around tenniscourts, and words gave way to silent cigarettes....

Then down deserted Prospect and along McCosh with song everywhere around them, up to the hot joviality

Tom D'Invilliers and Amory walked late in those days. A gambling fever swept through the sophomore class

and they bent over the bones till three o'clock many a sultry night. After one session they came out of

"Let's borrow bicycles and take a ride," Amory suggested. "All right. I'm not a bit tired and this is almost the

last night of the year, really, because the prom stuff starts Monday." They found two unlocked bicycles in

"Don't ask mesame old things, I suppose. A month or two in Lake GenevaI'm counting on you to be there in

July, you knowthen there'll be Minneapolis, and that means hundreds of summer hops, parlorsnaking,

"No," declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks, shod by Franks, "I've won this game, but I

feel as if I never want to play another. You're all rightyou're a rubber ball, and somehow it suits you, but I'm

sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren't

"You can't, Tom," argued Amory, as they rolled along through the scattering night; "wherever you go now

you'll always unconsciously apply these standards of 'having it' or 'lacking it.' For better or worse we've

"Well, then," complained Tom, his cracked voice rising plaintively, "why do I have to come back at all? I've

learned all that Princeton has to offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and lying around a club aren't going

to help. They're just going to disorganize me, conventionalize me completely. Even now I'm so spineless that

"Oh, but you're missing the real point, Tom," Amory interrupted. "You've just had your eyes opened to the

snobbishness of the world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the thoughtful man a social

"You consider you taught me that, don't you?" he asked quizzically, eying Amory in the half dark.

"Sometimes," he said slowly, "I think you're my bad angel. I might have been a pretty fair poet."

"Come on, that's rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern college. Either your eyes were opened to the

mean scrambling quality of people, or you'd have gone through blind, and you'd hate to have done thatbeen

"Yes," he agreed, "you're right. I wouldn't have liked it. Still, it's hard to be made a cynic at twenty."

"I was born one," Amory murmured. "I'm a cynical idealist." He paused and wondered if that meant anything.

"Yes; it's a good finish, it's knockout; everything's good tonight. Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and

Isabelle!" "Oh, you and your Isabelle! I'll bet she's a simple one ... let's say some poetry."

"I'll never be a poet," said Amory as he finished. "I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few

obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't

catch the subtle things like 'silversnarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write

They rode into Princeton as the sun was making colored maps of the sky behind the graduate school, and

hurried to the refreshment of a shower that would have to serve in place of sleep. By noon the

brightcostumed alumni crowded the streets with their bands and choruses, and in the tents there was great

reunion under the orangeandblack banners that curled and strained in the wind. Amory looked long at one

house which bore the legend "Sixtynine." There a few grayhaired men sat and talked quietly while the

Then tragedy's emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the edge of June. On the night after his ride to

Lawrenceville a crowd sallied to New York in quest of adventure, and started back to Princeton about twelve

o'clock in two machines. It had been a gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented. Amory

was in the car behind; they had taken the wrong road and lost the way, and so were hurrying to catch up.

It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to Amory's head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of

So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life stirred as it went by.... As the still ocean

paths before the shark in starred and glittering waterways, beautyhigh, the moonswathed trees divided, pair

A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a yellow moonthen silence, where crescendo

laughter fades ... the car swung out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows where the distance

They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was standing beside the road, talking to Alec

at the wheel. Afterward he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and the cracked

"Look!" She pointed and they gazed in horror. Under the full light of a roadside arclight lay a form, face

They sprang from the car. Amory thought of the back of that headthat hairthat hair ... and then they turned

"He's quite dead, all right. The car turned over. Two of the men that weren't hurt just carried the others in, but

Amory rushed into the house and the rest followed with a limp mass that they laid on the sofa in the shoddy

little front parlor. Sloane, with his shoulder punctured, was on another lounge. He was half delirious, and kept

"I don't know what happened," said Ferrenby in a strained voice. "Dick was driving and he wouldn't give up

the wheel; we told him he'd been drinking too muchthen there was this damn curveoh, my God!..." He

The doctor had arrived, and Amory went over to the couch, where some one handed him a sheet to put over

the body. With a sudden hardness, he raised one of the hands and let it fall back inertly. The brow was cold

but the face not expressionless. He looked at the shoelacesDick had tied them that morning. He had tied

themand now he was this heavy white mass. All that remained of the charm and personality of the Dick

Humbird he had knownoh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to the earth. All tragedy has that

strain of the grotesque and squalidso useless, futile ... the way animals die.... Amory was reminded of a cat

Amory stepped outside the door and shivered slightly at the late night winda wind that stirred a broken fender

Next day, by a merciful chance, passed in a whirl. When Amory was by himself his thoughts zigzagged

inevitably to the picture of that red mouth yawning incongruously in the white face, but with a determined

effort he piled present excitement upon the memory of it and shut it coldly away from his mind.

Isabelle and her mother drove into town at four, and they rode up smiling Prospect Avenue, through the gay

crowd, to have tea at Cottage. The clubs had their annual dinners that night, so at seven he loaned her to a

freshman and arranged to meet her in the gymnasium at eleven, when the upper classmen were admitted to

the freshman dance. She was all he had expected, and he was happy and eager to make that night the centre of

every dream. At nine the upper classes stood in front of the clubs as the freshman torchlight parade rioted

past, and Amory wondered if the dresssuited groups against the dark, stately backgrounds and under the

flare of the torches made the night as brilliant to the staring, cheering freshmen as it had been to him the year

The next day was another whirl. They lunched in a gay party of six in a private diningroom at the club,

while Isabelle and Amory looked at each other tenderly over the fried chicken and knew that their love was to

be eternal. They danced away the prom until five, and the stags cut in on Isabelle with joyous abandon, which

grew more and more enthusiastic as the hour grew late, and their wines, stored in overcoat pockets in the coat

room, made old weariness wait until another day. The stag line is a most homogeneous mass of men. It fairly

sways with a single soul. A darkhaired beauty dances by and there is a halfgasping sound as the ripple

surges forward and some one sleeker than the rest darts out and cuts in. Then when the sixfoot girl (brought

by Kaye in your class, and to whom he has been trying to introduce you all evening) gallops by, the line

surges back and the groups face about and become intent on far corners of the hall, for Kaye, anxious and

It delighted Amory when Isabelle suggested that they leave for a while and drive around in her car. For a

delicious hour that passed too soon they glided the silent roads about Princeton and talked from the surface of

their hearts in shy excitement. Amory felt strangely ingenuous and made no attempt to kiss her. Next day

they rode up through the Jersey country, had luncheon in New York, and in the afternoon went to see a

problem play at which Isabelle wept all through the second act, rather to Amory's embarrassmentthough it

filled him with tenderness to watch her. He was tempted to lean over and kiss away her tears, and she slipped

Then at six they arrived at the Borgis' summer place on Long Island, and Amory rushed upstairs to change

into a dinner coat. As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never

enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best in

his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was returned. Turning on all the lights, he looked at

himself in the mirror, trying to find in his own face the qualities that made him see clearer than the great

crowd of people, that made him decide firmly, and able to influence and follow his own will. There was little

in his life now that he would have changed.... Oxford might have been a bigger field.

Silently he admired himself. How conveniently well he looked, and how well a dinner coat became him. He

stepped into the hall and then waited at the top of the stairs, for he heard footsteps coming. It was Isabelle,

and from the top of her shining hair to her little golden slippers she had never seemed so beautiful. "Isabelle!"

he cried, half involuntarily, and held out his arms. As in the storybooks, she ran into them, and on that

halfminute, as their lips first touched, rested the high point of vanity, the crest of his young egotism.

"Your shirt studit hurt melook!" She was looking down at her neck, where a little blue spot about the size

"Oh, Isabelle," he reproached himself, "I'm a goopher. Really, I'm sorryI shouldn't have held you so close."

"Oh, Amory, of course you couldn't help it, and it didn't hurt much; but what are we going to do about it?"

"It isn't," she said, after a moment of concentrated gazing, "it's still thereand it looks like Old Nickoh,

She rubbed it delicately with the tips of her fingers, and then a tear gathered in the corner of her eye, and slid

down her cheek. "Oh, Amory," she said despairingly, lifting up a most pathetic face, "I'll just make my whole

"Don't touch me!" she cried. "Haven't I enough on my mind and you stand there and laugh!"

"Well, it is funny, Isabelle, and we were talking the other day about a sense of humor being"

She was looking at him with something that was not a smile, rather the faint, mirthless echo of a smile, in the

"Oh, shut up!" she cried suddenly, and fled down the hallway toward her room. Amory stood there, covered

When Isabelle reappeared she had thrown a light wrap about her shoulders, and they descended the stairs in a

"Isabelle," he began rather testily, as they arranged themselves in the car, bound for a dance at the Greenwich

Country Club, "you're angry, and I'll be, too, in a minute. Let's kiss and make up."

Amory kept his temper with difficulty. He became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for

Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then he knew he could

leave in the morning and not care. On the contrary, if he didn't kiss her, it would worry him

.... It would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror. It wasn't dignified to come off second

Perhaps she suspected this. At any rate, Amory watched the night that should have been the consummation of

romance glide by with great moths overhead and the heavy fragrance of roadside gardens, but without those

Afterward they suppered on ginger ale and devil's food in the pantry, and Amory announced a decision.

"Now, Isabelle," he interrupted, "you know it's not thateven suppose it is. We've reached the stage where we

either ought to kissorornothing. It isn't as if you were refusing on moral grounds."

"I really don't know what to think about you," she began, in a feeble, perverse attempt at conciliation. "You're

"Well, I thought you had a lot of selfconfidence and all that; remember you told me the other day that you

"Well, you didn't seem to feel so selfconfident tonight. Maybe you're just plain conceited."

"Oh, you and Princeton! You'd think that was the world, the way you talk! Perhaps you can write better than

anybody else on your old Princetonian; maybe the freshmen do think you're important" "You don't

"Yes, I do," she interrupted. "I do, because you're always talking about yourself and I used to like it; now I

"That's just the point," insisted Isabelle. "You got all upset tonight. You just sat and watched my eyes.

Besides, I have to think all the time I'm talking to youyou're so critical." "I make you think, do I?" Amory

"You're a nervous strain"this emphatically"and when you analyze every little emotion and instinct I just don't

have 'em." "I know." Amory admitted her point and shook his head helplessly. "Let's go." She stood up.

He rose abstractedly and they walked to the foot of the stairs. "What train can I get?"

They were at the head of the stairs, and as Amory turned into his room he thought he caught just the faintest

cloud of discontent in her face. He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much he caredhow much

of his sudden unhappiness was hurt vanitywhether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for romance.

When he awoke, it was with a glad flood of consciousness. The early wind stirred the chintz curtains at the

windows and he was idly puzzled not to be in his room at Princeton with his school football picture over the

bureau and the Triangle Club on the wall opposite. Then the grandfather's clock in the hall outside struck

eight, and the memory of the night before came to him. He was out of bed, dressing, like the wind; he must

get out of the house before he saw Isabelle. What had seemed a melancholy happening, now seemed a

tiresome anticlimax. He was dressed at half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of his

heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an ironic mockery the morning seemed!bright

and sunny, and full of the smell of the garden; hearing Mrs. Borgi's voice in the sunparlor below, he

He returned to his contemplation of the outdoors, and began repeating over and over, mechanically, a verse

But his life would not be unfulfilled. He took a sombre satisfaction in thinking that perhaps all along she had

been nothing except what he had read into her; that this was her high point, that no one else would ever make

her think. Yet that was what she had objected to in him; and Amory was suddenly tired of thinking, thinking!

On a dusty day in September Amory arrived in Princeton and joined the sweltering crowd of conditioned men

who thronged the streets. It seemed a stupid way to commence his upperclass years, to spend four hours a

morning in the stuffy room of a tutoring school, imbibing the infinite boredom of conic sections. Mr. Rooney,

pander to the dull, conducted the class and smoked innumerable Pall Malls as he drew diagrams and worked

Langueduc lazily shifts his sixfootthree of football material and tries to concentrate.

"Oh, why of course, of course you can't use that formula. That's what I wanted you to say."

The room was a study in stupiditytwo huge stands for paper, Mr. Rooney in his shirtsleeves in front of

them, and slouched around on chairs, a dozen men: Fred Sloane, the pitcher, who absolutely had to get

eligible; "Slim" Langueduc, who would beat Yale this fall, if only he could master a poor fifty per cent;

McDowell, gay young sophomore, who thought it was quite a sporting thing to be tutoring here with all these

"Those poor birds who haven't a cent to tutor, and have to study during the term are the ones I pity," he

announced to Amory one day, with a flaccid camaraderie in the droop of the cigarette from his pale lips. "I

should think it would be such a bore, there's so much else to do in New York during the term. I suppose they

don't know what they miss, anyhow." There was such an air of "you and I" about Mr. McDowell that Amory

very nearly pushed him out of the open window when he said this.... Next February his mother would wonder

Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that filled the room would come the inevitable

helpless cry: "I don't get it! Repeat that, Mr. Rooney!" Most of them were so stupid or careless that they

wouldn't admit when they didn't understand, and Amory was of the latter. He found it impossible to study

conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing respectability breathing defiantly through Mr.

Rooney's fetid parlors distorted their equations into insoluble anagrams. He made a last night's effort with the

proverbial wet towel, and then blissfully took the exam, wondering unhappily why all the color and ambition

of the spring before had faded out. Somehow, with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate success

had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a possible failure to pass off his condition with

equanimity, even though it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the Princetonian board and the slaughter

He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered from the room.

"If you don't pass it," said the newly arrived Alec as they sat on the windowseat of Amory's room and

mused upon a scheme of wall decoration, "you're the world's worst goopher. Your stock will go down like an

"'Cause you deserve it. Anybody that'd risk what you were in line for ought to be ineligible for Princetonian

"Oh, drop the subject," Amory protested. "Watch and wait and shut up. I don't want every one at the club

asking me about it, as if I were a prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show." One evening a week later

Amory stopped below his own window on the way to Renwick's, and, seeing a light, called up:

Alec's head appeared against the yellow square of light. "Yes, your result's here."

He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then suddenly noticed that there were other people

in the room. "'Lo, Kerry." He was most polite. "Ah, men of Princeton." They seemed to be mostly friends, so

he picked up the envelope marked "Registrar's Office," and weighed it nervously.

"Just to be dramatic, I'll let you know that if it's blue, my name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the

He paused, and then saw for the first time Ferrenby's eyes, wearing a hungry look and watching him eagerly.

"Watch my face, gentlemen, for the primitive emotions." He tore it open and held the slip up to the light.

There was a pause ... a small crowd of seconds swept by ... then he looked again and another crowd went on

What Amory did that year from early September to late in the spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive

that it seems scarcely worth recording. He was, of course, immediately sorry for what he had lost. His

"Nosomething deeper than that. I've begun to feel that I was meant to lose this chance."

"They're rather off you at the club, you know; every man that doesn't come through makes our crowd just so

"But, Amory, honestly, what makes me the angriest isn't the fact that you won't be chairman of the Prince and

on the Senior Council, but just that you didn't get down and pass that exam." "Not me," said Amory slowly;

"I'm mad at the concrete thing. My own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck broke."

"Well, what are you going to do? Get a better one quick, or just bum around for two more years as a

Amory's point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the true one. If his reactions to his environment

could be tabulated, the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his earliest years:

That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity. The fundamental Amory, idle,

imaginative, rebellious, had been nearly snowed under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as his

imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own success, he had listlessly, halfaccidentally chucked

His father died quietly and inconspicuously at Thanksgiving. The incongruity of death with either the

beauties of Lake Geneva or with his mother's dignified, reticent attitude diverted him, and he looked at the

funeral with an amused tolerance. He decided that burial was after all preferable to cremation, and he smiled

at his old boyhood choice, slow oxidation in the top of a tree. The day after the ceremony he was amusing

himself in the great library by sinking back on a couch in graceful mortuary attitudes, trying to determine

whether he would, when his day came, be found with his arms crossed piously over his chest (Monsignor

Darcy had once advocated this posture as being the most distinguished), or with his hands clasped behind his

What interested him much more than the final departure of his father from things mundane was a

tricornered conversation between Beatrice, Mr. Barton, of Barton and Krogman, their lawyers, and himself,

that took place several days after the funeral. For the first time he came into actual cognizance of the family

finances, and realized what a tidy fortune had once been under his father's management. He took a ledger

labelled "1906" and ran through it rather carefully. The total expenditure that year had come to something

over one hundred and ten thousand dollars. Forty thousand of this had been Beatrice's own income, and there

had been no attempt to account for it: it was all under the heading, "Drafts, checks, and letters of credit

forwarded to Beatrice Blaine." The dispersal of the rest was rather minutely itemized: the taxes and

improvements on the Lake Geneva estate had come to almost nine thousand dollars; the general upkeep,

including Beatrice's electric and a French car, bought that year, was over thirtyfive thousand dollars. The

rest was fully taken care of, and there were invariably items which failed to balance on the right side of the

In the volume for 1912 Amory was shocked to discover the decrease in the number of bond holdings and the

great drop in the income. In the case of Beatrice's money this was not so pronounced, but it was obvious that

his father had devoted the previous year to several unfortunate gambles in oil. Very little of the oil had been

burned, but Stephen Blaine had been rather badly singed. The next year and the next and the next showed

similar decreases, and Beatrice had for the first time begun using her own money for keeping up the house.

About the exact state of things Mr. Barton was quite vague and confused. There had been recent investments,

the outcome of which was for the present problematical, and he had an idea there were further speculations

It was not for several months that Beatrice wrote Amory the full situation. The entire residue of the Blaine

and O'Hara fortunes consisted of the place at Lake Geneva and approximately a half million dollars, invested

now in fairly conservative sixpercent holdings. In fact, Beatrice wrote that she was putting the money into

"I am quite sure," she wrote to Amory, "that if there is one thing we can be positive of, it is that people will

not stay in one place. This Ford person has certainly made the most of that idea. So I am instructing Mr.

Barton to specialize on such things as Northern Pacific and these Rapid Transit Companies, as they call the

streetcars. I shall never forgive myself for not buying Bethlehem Steel. I've heard the most fascinating

stories. You must go into finance, Amory. I'm sure you would revel in it. You start as a messenger or a teller,

I believe, and from that you go upalmost indefinitely. I'm sure if I were a man I'd love the handling of money;

it has become quite a senile passion with me. Before I get any farther I want to discuss something. A Mrs.

Bispam, an overcordial little lady whom I met at a tea the other day, told me that her son, he is at Yale, wrote

her that all the boys there wore their summer underwear all during the winter, and also went about with their

heads wet and in low shoes on the coldest days. Now, Amory, I don't know whether that is a fad at Princeton

too, but I don't want you to be so foolish. It not only inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile

paralysis, but to all forms of lung trouble, to which you are particularly inclined. You cannot experiment with

your health. I have found that out. I will not make myself ridiculous as some mothers no doubt do, by

insisting that you wear overshoes, though I remember one Christmas you wore them around constantly

without a single buckle latched, making such a curious swishing sound, and you refused to buckle them

because it was not the thing to do. The very next Christmas you would not wear even rubbers, though I

begged you. You are nearly twenty years old now, dear, and I can't be with you constantly to find whether

"This has been a very practical letter. I warned you in my last that the lack of money to do the things one

wants to makes one quite prosy and domestic, but there is still plenty for everything if we are not too

extravagant. Take care of yourself, my dear boy, and do try to write at least once a week, because I imagine

Monsignor Darcy invited Amory up to the Stuart palace on the Hudson for a week at Christmas, and they had

enormous conversations around the open fire. Monsignor was growing a trifle stouter and his personality had

expanded even with that, and Amory felt both rest and security in sinking into a squat, cushioned chair and

"Not at all petty. I think it's most important. I want to hear the whole thing. Everything you've been doing

Amory talked; he went thoroughly into the destruction of his egotistic highways, and in a halfhour the

"What would you do if you left college?" asked Monsignor. "Don't know. I'd like to travel, but of course this

tiresome war prevents that. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate. I'm just at sea. Kerry

"Well, you'd have to be very much more tired of life than I think you are. I know you."

"I'm afraid you do," agreed Amory reluctantly. "It just seemed an easy way out of everythingwhen I think of

"Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I'm not worried about you; you seem to me to be progressing perfectly

naturally." "No," Amory objected. "I've lost half my personality in a year." "Not a bit of it!" scoffed

"Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I'd gone through another fifth form at St. Regis's."

"No." Monsignor shook his head. "That was a misfortune; this has been a good thing. Whatever worth while

"What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?" "Perhaps in itself ... but you're developing.

This has given you time to think and you're casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and the

superman and all. People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have

an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any highhanded scheme of blind

"Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I can do the one hundred things

beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall."

"Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I should do."

"A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane you tell me of evidently are.

Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts onI've seen it vanish in a long

sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand,

gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been

hungglittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them."

"And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off when I needed them." Amory continued the

simile eagerly. "Yes, that's it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and talents and all that are hung out,

you need never bother about anybody; you can cope with them without difficulty."

"Now you've a clean starta start Kerry or Sloane can constitutionally never have. You brushed three or four

ornaments down, and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new

ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting the better. But remember, do the next thing!"

So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy and religion, and life as respectively a game

or a mystery. The priest seemed to guess Amory's thoughts before they were clear in his own head, so closely

"Why do I make lists?" Amory asked him one night. "Lists of all sorts of things?"

"Because you're a medifvalist," Monsignor answered. "We both are. It's the passion for classifying and

"I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here. It was a pose, I guess."

"Don't worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of all. Pose"

After Amory returned to college he received several letters from Monsignor which gave him more egotistic

I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable safety, and you must remember that I did

that through faith in your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will arrive without struggle.

Some nuances of character you will have to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in

confessing them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable of affection, astute without being cunning

Don't let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think

best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it; at fifteen you

had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon,

and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.

If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. Your last, that dissertation on architecture, was

perfectly awfulso "highbrow" that I picture you living in an intellectual and emotional vacuum; and beware

of trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist

annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are

merely packing a Jackinthebox that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really

antagonistic contact with the world. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a

You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or

You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this "woman proposition"; but it's more than

that, Amory; it's the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck, and I know whereof I

speak; it's that halfmiraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it's the halfrealized fear of God in your

Whatever your metier proves to bereligion, architecture, literatureI'm sure you would be much safer anchored

to the Church, but I won't risk my influence by arguing with you even though I am secretly sure that the

Even Amory's reading paled during this period; he delved further into the misty side streets of literature:

Huysmans, Walter Pater, Theophile Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius, and

Suetonius. One week, through general curiosity, he inspected the private libraries of his classmates and found

Sloane's as typical as any: sets of Kipling, O. Henry, John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis; "What Every

MiddleAged Woman Ought to Know," "The Spell of the Yukon"; a "gift" copy of James Whitcomb Riley,

an assortment of battered, annotated schoolbooks, and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own late discoveries,

Together with Tom D'Invilliers, he sought among the lights of Princeton for some one who might found the

The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that year than had been the entirely Philistine

Princeton of two years before. Things had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the

spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old Princeton they would never have discovered Tanaduke

Wylie. Tanaduke was a sophomore, with tremendous ears and a way of saying, "The earth swirls down

through the ominous moons of preconsidered generations!" that made them vaguely wonder why it did not

sound quite clear, but never question that it was the utterance of a supersoul. At least so Tom and Amory took

him. They told him in all earnestness that he had a mind like Shelley's, and featured his ultrafree free verse

and prose poetry in the Nassau Literary Magazine. But Tanaduke's genius absorbed the many colors of the

age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to their great disappointment. He talked of Greenwich Village now

instead of "noonswirled moons," and met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Fortysecond Street

and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dreamchildren with whom he had regaled their expectant

appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to the futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do

better there. Tom gave him the final advice that he should stop writing for two years and read the complete

works of Alexander Pope four times, but on Amory's suggestion that Pope for Tanaduke was like footease

for stomach trouble, they withdrew in laughter, and called it a coin's toss whether this genius was too big or

Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who dispensed easy epigrams and thimblefuls of

Chartreuse to groups of admirers every night. He was disappointed, too, at the air of general uncertainty on

every subject that seemed linked with the pedantic temperament; his opinions took shape in a miniature satire

In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to enroll in the Lafayette Esquadrille. Amory's envy

and admiration of this step was drowned in an experience of his own to which he never succeeded in giving

an appropriate value, but which, nevertheless, haunted him for three years afterward.

Healy's they left at twelve and taxied to Bistolary's. There were Axia Marlowe and Phoebe Column, from the

Summer Garden show, Fred Sloane and Amory. The evening was so very young that they felt ridiculous with

"Table for four in the middle of the floor," yelled Phoebe. "Hurry, old dear, tell 'em we're here!"

"Tell 'em to play 'Admiration'!" shouted Sloane. "You two order; Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked

calf," and they sailed off in the muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind a

"There's Findle Margotson, from New Haven!" she cried above the uproar. "'Lo, Findle! Whooee!"

"Oh, Axia!" he shouted in salutation. "C'mon over to our table." "No!" Amory whispered.

"Can't do it, Findle; I'm with somebody else! Call me up tomorrow about one o'clock!"

Findle, a nondescript manaboutBisty's, answered incoherently and turned back to the brilliant blonde

"Oh, he's all right. Here's the old jitney waiter. If you ask me, I want a double Daiquiri."

The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from the colleges, with a scattering of the

male refuse of Broadway, and women of two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl. On the whole it

was a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any. About threefourths of the whole business was for

effect and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the cafi, soon enough for the fiveo'clock train back to

Yale or Princeton; about onefourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered strange dust from

strange places. Their party was scheduled to be one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column

were old friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared even in the dead of night, and

the unusual, which lurks least in the cafi, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him

the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly terrible, so unbelievable, that

afterward he never thought of it as experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind the

About one o'clock they moved to Maxim's, and two found them in Devinihre's. Sloane had been drinking

consecutively and was in a state of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely sober; they had

run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers of champagne who usually assisted their New York parties.

They were just through dancing and were making their way back to their chairs when Amory became aware

that some one at a nearby table was looking at him. He turned and glanced casually ... a middleaged man

dressed in a brown sack suit, it was, sitting a little apart at a table by himself and watching their party

intently. At Amory's glance he smiled faintly. Amory turned to Fred, who was just sitting down.

"Who's that pale fool watching us?" he complained indignantly. "Where?" cried Sloane. "We'll have him

thrown out!" He rose to his feet and swayed back and forth, clinging to his chair. "Where is he?"

Axia and Phoebe suddenly leaned and whispered to each other across the table, and before Amory realized it

"Up to the flat," suggested Phoebe. "We've got brandy and fizzand everything's slow down here tonight."

Amory considered quickly. He hadn't been drinking, and decided that if he took no more, it would be

reasonably discreet for him to trot along in the party. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the thing to do in order to

keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a state to do his own thinking. So he took Axia's arm and, piling

intimately into a taxicab, they drove out over the hundreds and drew up at a tall, whitestone

apartmenthouse.... Never would he forget that street.... It was a broad street, lined on both sides with just

such tall, whitestone buildings, dotted with dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see,

flooded with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor. He imagined each one to have an elevator

and a colored hallboy and a keyrack; each one to be eight stories high and full of three and four room

suites. He was rather glad to walk into the cheeriness of Phoebe's livingroom and sink onto a sofa, while the

"I'm only going to stay half an hour," Amory said sternly. He wondered if it sounded priggish.

"Amory, pour 'em out," she said, "and we'll drink to Fred Sloane, who has a rare, distinguished edge."

"Yes," said Axia, coming in, "and Amory. I like Amory." She sat down beside him and laid her yellow head

There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm wind, and his imagination turned to fire, and

he took the glass from Phoebe's hand. That was all; for at the second that his decision came, he looked up and

saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the cafi, and with his jump of astonishment the glass fell

from his uplifted hand. There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan. His

face was cast in the same yellow wax as in the cafi, neither the dull, pasty color of a dead manrather a sort of

virile pallornor unhealthy, you'd have called it; but like a strong man who'd worked in a mine or done night

shifts in a damp climate. Amory looked him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after a fashion,

down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind that is called frank, and he had steady gray eyes that

moved slowly from one to the other of their group, with just the shade of a questioning expression. Amory

noticed his hands; they weren't fine at all, but they had versatility and a tenuous strength ... they were nervous

hands that sat lightly along the cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and closings. Then,

suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet

were all wrong ... with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew.... It was like weakness in a good

woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain.

He wore no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like the shoes they wore in the

fourteenth century, and with the little ends curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill

He must have said something, or looked something, for Axia's voice came out of the void with a strange

"You mean that purple zebra!" shrieked Axia facetiously. "Oooee! Amory's got a purple zebra watching

There was a silence.... The man regarded Amory quizzically.... Then the human voices fell faintly on his ear:

"Thought you weren't drinking," remarked Axia sardonically, but her voice was good to hear; the whole

divan that held the man was alive; alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling worms....

"Come back! Come back!" Axia's arm fell on his. "Amory, dear, you aren't going, Amory!" He was halfway

The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep, paled to a livid bronze ... Axia's beseeching

As they settled to the lower floor the feet came into view in the sickly electric light of the paved hall.

Down the long street came the moon, and Amory turned his back on it and walked. Ten, fifteen steps away

sounded the footsteps. They were like a slow dripping, with just the slightest insistence in their fall. Amory's

shadow lay, perhaps, ten feet ahead of him, and soft shoes was presumably that far behind. With the instinct

of a child Amory edged in under the blue darkness of the white buildings, cleaving the moonlight for haggard

seconds, once bursting into a slow run with clumsy stumblings. After that he stopped suddenly; he must keep

If he met any one goodwere there any good people left in the world or did they all live in white

apartmenthouses now? Was every one followed in the moonlight? But if he met some one good who'd know

what he meant and hear this damned scuffle ... then the scuffling grew suddenly nearer, and a black cloud

settled over the moon. When again the pale sheen skimmed the cornices, it was almost beside him, and

Amory thought he heard a quiet breathing. Suddenly he realized that the footsteps were not behind, had never

been behind, they were ahead and he was not eluding but following ... following. He began to run, blindly,

his heart knocking heavily, his hands clinched. Far ahead a black dot showed itself, resolved slowly into a

human shape. But Amory was beyond that now; he turned off the street and darted into an alley, narrow and

dark and smelling of old rottenness. He twisted down a long, sinuous blackness, where the moonlight was

shut away except for tiny glints and patches ... then suddenly sank panting into a corner by a fence,

exhausted. The steps ahead stopped, and he could hear them shift slightly with a continuous motion, like

He put his face in his hands and covered eyes and ears as well as he could. During all this time it never

occurred to him that he was delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as material things could never

give him. His intellectual content seemed to submit passively to it, and it fitted like a glove everything that

had ever preceded it in his life. It did not muddle him. It was like a problem whose answer he knew on paper,

yet whose solution he was unable to grasp. He was far beyond horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of

that, now moved in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls were real, living things, things he must

accept. Only far inside his soul a little fire leaped and cried that something was pulling him down, trying to

get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After that door was slammed there would be only footfalls and

During the five or ten minutes he waited in the shadow of the fence, there was somehow this fire ... that was

"I want some one stupid. Oh, send some one stupid!" This to the black fence opposite him, in whose shadows

the footsteps shuffled ... shuffled. He supposed "stupid" and "good" had become somehow intermingled

through previous association. When he called thus it was not an act of will at allwill had turned him away

from the moving figure in the street; it was almost instinct that called, just the pile on pile of inherent

tradition or some wild prayer from way over the night. Then something clanged like a low gong struck at a

distance, and before his eyes a face flashed over the two feet, a face pale and distorted with a sort of infinite

evil that twisted it like flame in the wind; but he knew, for the half instant that the gong tanged and hummed,

Minutes later he sprang to his feet, realizing dimly that there was no more sound, and that he was alone in the

graying alley. It was cold, and he started on a steady run for the light that showed the street at the other end.

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and

remembered that he had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a pile by

his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory's mind was

working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked

his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of

the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air on

Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know;

he apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind back and forth

like a shrieking saw. Then Broadway broke upon them, and with the babel of noise and the painted faces a

"Do you mean to say," said Sloane stolidly, "that 'cause you had some sort of indigestion that made you act

Simultaneously Amory classed him with the crowd, and he seemed no longer Sloane of the debonair humor

and the happy personality, but only one of the evil faces that whirled along the turbid stream.

"Man!" he shouted so loud that the people on the corner turned and followed them with their eyes, "it's filthy,

"I can't help it," said Sloane doggedly. "What's the matter with you? Old remorse getting you? You'd be in a

"I'm going, Fred," said Amory slowly. His knees were shaking under him, and he knew that if he stayed

another minute on this street he would keel over where he stood. "I'll be at the Vanderbilt for lunch." And he

strode rapidly off and turned over to Fifth Avenue. Back at the hotel he felt better, but as he walked into the

barbershop, intending to get a head massage, the smell of the powders and tonics brought back Axia's

sidelong, suggestive smile, and he left hurriedly. In the doorway of his room a sudden blackness flowed

around him like a divided river. When he came to himself he knew that several hours had passed. He pitched

onto the bed and rolled over on his face with a deadly fear that he was going mad. He wanted people, people,

some one sane and stupid and good. He lay for he knew not how long without moving. He could feel the little

hot veins on his forehead standing out, and his terror had hardened on him like plaster. He felt he was passing

up again through the thin crust of horror, and now only could he distinguish the shadowy twilight he was

leaving. He must have fallen asleep again, for when he next recollected himself he had paid the hotel bill and

On the train for Princeton he saw no one he knew, only a crowd of faggedlooking Philadelphians. The

presence of a painted woman across the aisle filled him with a fresh burst of sickness and he changed to

another car, tried to concentrate on an article in a popular magazine. He found himself reading the same

paragraphs over and over, so he abandoned this attempt and leaning over wearily pressed his hot forehead

against the damp windowpane. The car, a smoker, was hot and stuffy with most of the smells of the state's

alien population; he opened a window and shivered against the cloud of fog that drifted in over him. The two

hours' ride were like days, and he nearly cried aloud with joy when the towers of Princeton loomed up beside

Tom was standing in the centre of the room, pensively relighting a cigarstub. Amory fancied he looked

"Had a hell of a dream about you last night," came in the cracked voice through the cigar smoke. "I had an

"Don't tell me about it!" Amory almost shrieked. "Don't say a word; I'm tired and pepped out."

Tom looked at him queerly and then sank into a chair and opened his Italian notebook. Amory threw his

coat and hat on the floor, loosened his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the shelf. "Wells is

Half an hour passed. Outside the wind came up, and Amory started as the wet branches moved and clawed

with their fingernails at the windowpane. Tom was deep in his work, and inside the room only the

occasional scratch of a match or the rustle of leather as they shifted in their chairs broke the stillness. Then

like a zigzag of lightning came the change. Amory sat bolt upright, frozen cold in his chair. Tom was looking

"Oh, my heavens!" shouted Tom, "look behind!" Quick as a flash Amory whirled around. He saw nothing but

the dark windowpane. "It's gone now," came Tom's voice after a second in a still terror. "Something was

Trembling violently, Amory dropped into his chair again. "I've got to tell you," he said. "I've had one hell of

an experience. I think I'veI've seen the devil orsomething like him. What face did you just see?or no," he

And he gave Tom the story. It was midnight when he finished, and after that, with all lights burning, two

sleepy, shivering boys read to each other from "The New Machiavelli," until dawn came up out of

Witherspoon Hall, and the Princetonian fell against the door, and the May birds hailed the sun on last night's

DURING Princeton's transition period, that is, during Amory's last two years there, while he saw it change

and broaden and live up to its Gothic beauty by better means than night parades, certain individuals arrived

who stirred it to its plethoric depths. Some of them had been freshmen, and wild freshmen, with Amory;

some were in the class below; and it was in the beginning of his last year and around small tables at the

Nassau Inn that they began questioning aloud the institutions that Amory and countless others before him had

questioned so long in secret. First, and partly by accident, they struck on certain books, a definite type of

biographical novel that Amory christened "quest" books. In the "quest" book the hero set off in life armed

with the best weapons and avowedly intending to use them as such weapons are usually used, to push their

possessors ahead as selfishly and blindly as possible, but the heroes of the "quest" books discovered that there

might be a more magnificent use for them. "None Other Gods," "Sinister Street," and "The Research

Magnificent" were examples of such books; it was the latter of these three that gripped Burne Holiday and

made him wonder in the beginning of senior year how much it was worth while being a diplomatic autocrat

around his club on Prospect Avenue and basking in the high lights of class office. It was distinctly through

the channels of aristocracy that Burne found his way. Amory, through Kerry, had had a vague drifting

acquaintance with him, but not until January of senior year did their friendship commence.

"Heard the latest?" said Tom, coming in late one drizzly evening with that triumphant air he always wore

"Worse than that. About onethird of the junior class are going to resign from their clubs."

Spirit of reform and all that. Burne Holiday is behind it. The club presidents are holding a meeting tonight

"Oh, clubs injurious to Princeton democracy; cost a lot; draw social lines, take time; the regular line you get

sometimes from disappointed sophomores. Woodrow thought they should be abolished and all that."

"Well," began Tom, "it seems that the idea developed simultaneously in several heads. I was talking to Burne

awhile ago, and he claims that it's a logical result if an intelligent person thinks long enough about the social

system. They had a 'discussion crowd' and the point of abolishing the clubs was brought up by some

oneeverybody there leaped at itit had been in each one's mind, more or less, and it just needed a spark to

"Fine! I swear I think it'll be most entertaining. How do they feel up at Cap and Gown?"

"Wild, of course. Every one's been sitting and arguing and swearing and getting mad and getting sentimental

and getting brutal. It's the same at all the clubs; I've been the rounds. They get one of the radicals in the

"Oh, moderately well. Burne's a damn good talker, and so obviously sincere that you can't get anywhere with

him. It's so evident that resigning from his club means so much more to him than preventing it does to us that

I felt futile when I argued; finally took a position that was brilliantly neutral. In fact, I believe Burne thought

for a while that he'd converted me." "And you say almost a third of the junior class are going to resign?"

There was a brisk knock at the door, and Burne himself came in. "Hello, Amoryhello, Tom."

"You probably know what I want to talk to Tom about, and it isn't a bit private. I wish you'd stay."

"I'd be glad to." Amory sat down again, and as Burne perched on a table and launched into argument with

Tom, he looked at this revolutionary more carefully than he ever had before. Broadbrowed and

strongchinned, with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerry's, Burne was a man who gave an

immediate impression of bigness and securitystubborn, that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no

stolidity, and when he had talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had in it no quality

The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird.

This time it began as purely a mental interest. With other men of whom he had thought as primarily

firstclass, he had been attracted first by their personalities, and in Burne he missed that immediate

magnetism to which he usually swore allegiance. But that night Amory was struck by Burne's intense

earnestness, a quality he was accustomed to associate only with the dread stupidity, and by the great

enthusiasm that struck dead chords in his heart. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting

towardand it was almost time that land was in sight. Tom and Amory and Alec had reached an impasse; never

did they seem to have new experiences in common, for Tom and Alec had been as blindly busy with their

committees and boards as Amory had been blindly idling, and the things they had for dissectioncollege,

contemporary personality and the likethey had hashed and rehashed for many a frugal conversational meal.

That night they discussed the clubs until twelve, and, in the main, they agreed with Burne. To the roommates

it did not seem such a vital subject as it had in the two years before, but the logic of Burne's objections to the

social system dovetailed so completely with everything they had thought, that they questioned rather than

argued, and envied the sanity that enabled this man to stand out so against all traditions.

Then Amory branched off and found that Burne was deep in other things as well. Economics had interested

him and he was turning socialist. Pacifism played in the back of his mind, and he read the Masses and Lyoff

"Don't know. I'm in a muddle about a lot of thingsI've just discovered that I've a mind, and I'm starting to

"Everything. I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things to make me think. I'm reading the four

"Wells, I guess, and Tolstoi, and a man named Edward Carpenter. I've been reading for over a year nowon a

"Well, frankly, not what you call poetry, or for your reasonsyou two write, of course, and look at things

"Well, I'm ashamed to say that I'm a blank on the subject of Whitman. How about you, Tom?"

"Well," continued Burne, "you may strike a few poems that are tiresome, but I mean the mass of his work.

He's tremendouslike Tolstoi. They both look things in the face, and, somehow, different as they are, stand for

somewhat the same things." "You have me stumped, Burne," Amory admitted. "I've read 'Anna Karinina' and

the 'Kreutzer Sonata' of course, but Tolstoi is mostly in the original Russian as far as I'm concerned." "He's

the greatest man in hundreds of years," cried Burne enthusiastically. "Did you ever see a picture of that

They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when Amory crept shivering into bed it was

with his mind aglow with ideas and a sense of shock that some one else had discovered the path he might

have followed. Burne Holiday was so evidently developingand Amory had considered that he was doing the

same. He had fallen into a deep cynicism over what had crossed his path, plotted the imperfectability of man

and read Shaw and Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges of decadencenow suddenly all his

mental processes of the last year and a half seemed stale and futilea petty consummation of himself ... and

like a sombre background lay that incident of the spring before, that filled half his nights with a dreary terror

and made him unable to pray. He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had,

the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such

reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram,

with his adulation of thirteenthcentury cathedralsa Catholicism which Amory found convenient and

He could not sleep, so he turned on his readinglamp and, taking down the "Kreutzer Sonata," searched it

carefully for the germs of Burne's enthusiasm. Being Burne was suddenly so much realler than being clever.

He thought back through two years, of Burne as a hurried, nervous freshman, quite submerged in his brother's

personality. Then he remembered an incident of sophomore year, in which Burne had been suspected of the

Dean Hollister had been heard by a large group arguing with a taxidriver, who had driven him from the

junction. In the course of the altercation the dean remarked that he "might as well buy the taxicab." He paid

and walked off, but next morning he entered his private office to find the taxicab itself in the space usually

occupied by his desk, bearing a sign which read "Property of Dean Hollister. Bought and Paid for."... It took

two expert mechanics half a day to dissemble it into its minutest parts and remove it, which only goes to

Then again, that very fall, Burne had caused a sensation. A certain Phyllis Styles, an intercollegiate

promtrotter, had failed to get her yearly invitation to the HarvardPrinceton game.

Jesse Ferrenby had brought her to a smaller game a few weeks before, and had pressed Burne into serviceto

"Are you coming to the Harvard game?" Burne had asked indiscreetly, merely to make conversation.

"Of course I do," said Burne feebly. He was unversed in the arts of Phyllis, and was sure that this was merely

a vapid form of kidding. Before an hour had passed he knew that he was indeed involved. Phyllis had pinned

him down and served him up, informed him the train she was arriving by, and depressed him thoroughly.

Aside from loathing Phyllis, he had particularly wanted to stag that game and entertain some Harvard friends.

"She'll see," he informed a delegation who arrived in his room to josh him. "This will be the last game she

"But, Burnewhy did you invite her if you didn't want her?" "Burne, you know you're secretly mad about

"What can you do, Burne? What can you do against Phyllis?" But Burne only shook his head and muttered

threats which consisted largely of the phrase: "She'll see, she'll see!" The blithesome Phyllis bore her

twentyfive summers gayly from the train, but on the platform a ghastly sight met her eyes. There were

Burne and Fred Sloane arrayed to the last dot like the lurid figures on college posters. They had bought

flaring suits with huge pegtop trousers and gigantic padded shoulders. On their heads were rakish college

hats, pinned up in front and sporting bright orangeandblack bands, while from their celluloid collars

blossomed flaming orange ties. They wore black armbands with orange "P's," and carried canes flying

Princeton pennants, the effect completed by socks and peeping handkerchiefs in the same color motifs. On a

A good half of the station crowd was already staring at them, torn between horrified pity and riotous mirth,

and as Phyllis, with her svelte jaw dropping, approached, the pair bent over and emitted a college cheer in

loud, farcarrying voices, thoughtfully adding the name "Phyllis" to the end. She was vociferously greeted

and escorted enthusiastically across the campus, followed by half a hundred village urchinsto the stifled

laughter of hundreds of alumni and visitors, half of whom had no idea that this was a practical joke, but

thought that Burne and Fred were two varsity sports showing their girl a collegiate time.

Phyllis's feelings as she was paraded by the Harvard and Princeton stands, where sat dozens of her former

devotees, can be imagined. She tried to walk a little ahead, she tried to walk a little behindbut they stayed

close, that there should be no doubt whom she was with, talking in loud voices of their friends on the football

That had been Burne, dynamically humorous, fundamentally serious. From that root had blossomed the

So the weeks passed and March came and the clay feet that Amory looked for failed to appear. About a

hundred juniors and seniors resigned from their clubs in a final fury of righteousness, and the clubs in

helplessness turned upon Burne their finest weapon: ridicule. Every one who knew him liked himbut what he

stood for (and he began to stand for more all the time) came under the lash of many tongues, until a frailer

They had taken to exchanging calls several times a week. "Of course I don't. What's prestige, at best?"

"Some people say that you're just a rather original politician." He roared with laughter.

One afternoon they dipped into a subject that had interested Amory for a long timethe matter of the bearing of

physical attributes on a man's makeup. Burne had gone into the biology of this, and then:

"Of course health countsa healthy man has twice the chance of being good," he said.

"Oh, no," Amory protested. "He worked too hard for that. I imagine that when he died he was a brokendown

"Well, even granting that, I don't think health has anything to do with goodness; of course, it's valuable to a

great saint to be able to stand enormous strains, but this fad of popular preachers rising on their toes in

simulated virility, bellowing that calisthenics will save the worldno, Burne, I can't go that." "Well, let's waive

itwe won't get anywhere, and besides I haven't quite made up my mind about it myself. Now, here's

"That's what Tom and I figured," Amory agreed. "We took the yearbooks for the last ten years and looked at

the pictures of the senior council. I know you don't think much of that august body, but it does represent

success here in a general way. Well, I suppose only about thirtyfive per cent of every class here are blonds,

are really lightyet twothirds of every senior council are light. We looked at pictures of ten years of them,

mind you; that means that out of every fifteen lighthaired men in the senior class one is on the senior

"It's true," Burne agreed. "The lighthaired man is a higher type, generally speaking. I worked the thing out

with the Presidents of the United States once, and found that way over half of them were lighthairedyet

People unconsciously admit it," said Amory. "You'll notice a blond person is expected to talk. If a blond girl

doesn't talk we call her a 'doll'; if a lighthaired man is silent he's considered stupid. Yet the world is full of

'dark silent men' and 'languorous brunettes' who haven't a brain in their heads, but somehow are never

"And the large mouth and broad chin and rather big nose undoubtedly make the superior face."

"I'm not so sure." Amory was all for classical features. "Oh, yesI'll show you," and Burne pulled out of his

desk a photographic collection of heavily bearded, shaggy celebritiesTolstoi, Whitman, Carpenter, and

Amory tried politely to appreciate them, and gave up laughingly. "Burne, I think they're the ugliestlooking

"Oh, Amory, look at that forehead on Emerson; look at Tolstoi's eyes." His tone was reproachful.

"No! Call them remarkablelooking or anything you wantbut ugly they certainly are."

Unabashed, Burne ran his hand lovingly across the spacious foreheads, and piling up the pictures put them

back in his desk. Walking at night was one of his favorite pursuits, and one night he persuaded Amory to

"I hate the dark," Amory objected. "I didn't use toexcept when I was particularly imaginative, but now, I

"We'll go east," Burne suggested, "and down that string of roads through the woods."

"Doesn't sound very appealing to me," admitted Amory reluctantly, "but let's go."

They set off at a good gait, and for an hour swung along in a brisk argument until the lights of Princeton were

"Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid," said Burne earnestly. And this very walking at

night is one of the things I was afraid about. I'm going to tell you why I can walk anywhere now and not be

"Go on," Amory urged eagerly. They were striding toward the woods, Burne's nervous, enthusiastic voice

"I used to come out here alone at night, oh, three months ago, and I always stopped at that crossroad we just

passed. There were the woods looming up ahead, just as they do now, there were dogs howling and the

shadows and no human sound. Of course, I peopled the woods with everything ghastly, just like you do; don't

"Well, I began analyzing itmy imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the darkso I stuck my

imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at meI let it play stray dog or escaped convict or ghost,

and then saw myself coming along the road. That made it all rightas it always makes everything all right to

project yourself completely into another's place. I knew that if I were the dog or the convict or the ghost I

wouldn't be a menace to Burne Holiday any more than he was a menace to me. Then I thought of my watch.

I'd better go back and leave it and then essay the woods. No; I decided, it's better on the whole that I should

lose a watch than that I should turn backand I did go into themnot only followed the road through them, but

walked into them until I wasn't frightened any moredid it until one night I sat down and dozed off in there;

"Lordy," Amory breathed. "I couldn't have done that. I'd have come out halfway, and the first time an

automobile passed and made the dark thicker when its lamps disappeared, I'd have come in."

"Well," Burne said suddenly, after a few moments' silence, "we're halfway through, let's turn back."

"It's the whole thing," he asserted. "It's the one dividing line between good and evil. I've never met a man

"They're usually insane. If not, they're weak. There is no such thing as a strong, sane criminal."

On this point Amory could not agree. It seemed to him that life and history were rife with the strong criminal,

keen, but often selfdeluding; in politics and business one found him and among the old statesmen and kings

and generals; but Burne never agreed and their courses began to split on that point.

Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vicepresidency of

the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate

lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as

if waiting for something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in

his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point. He grew more abstracted on the street

and was even accused of becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne

passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with

the romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever

unable to get a foothold. "I tell you," Amory declared to Tom, "he's the first contemporary I've ever met

"He's way over their headsyou know you think so yourself when you talk to himGood Lord, Tom, you used

to stand out against 'people.' Success has completely conventionalized you." Tom grew rather annoyed.

"No! not like anybody you've ever seen. Never enters the Philadelphian Society. He has no faith in that rot.

He doesn't believe that public swimmingpools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world;

The argument ended nowhere, but Amory noticed more than ever how the sentiment toward Burne had

"It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more amicable on the subject, "that the people

who violently disapprove of Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee classI mean they're the

besteducated men in collegethe editors of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger professors....

The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old Burne has got

some queer ideas in his head,' and pass onthe Pharisee classGee! they ridicule him unmercifully."

"Over to the Prince office to see Ferrenby," he waved a copy of the morning's Princetonian at Amory. "He

"Nobut he's got me all balled up. Either I've misjudged him or he's suddenly become the world's worst

Burne hurried on, and it was several days before Amory heard an account of the ensuing conversation. Burne

"Aren't you afraid the faculty'll get after you if you pull this irreligious stuff?"

"What the devilthat editorial was on the coaching system." "Yes, but that quotation"

"Well, you say herelet me see." Burne opened the paper and read: "'He who is not with me is against me, as

that gentleman said who was notoriously capable of only coarse distinctions and puerile generalities.'"

"What of it?" Ferrenby began to look alarmed. "Oliver Cromwell said it, didn't he? or was it Washington, or

"Well," said Burne, recovering his voice, "St. Matthew attributes it to Christ."

The weeks tore by. Amory wandered occasionally to New York on the chance of finding a new shining green

autobus, that its stickofcandy glamour might penetrate his disposition. One day he ventured into a

stockcompany revival of a play whose name was faintly familiar. The curtain rosehe watched casually as a

girl entered. A few phrases rang in his ear and touched a faint chord of memory. Where? When?

Then he seemed to hear a voice whispering beside him, a very soft, vibrant voice: "Oh, I'm such a poor little

"Ghosts are such dumb things," said Alec, "they're slowwitted. I can always outguess a ghost."

"Well, it depends where. Take a bedroom, for example. If you use any discretion a ghost can never get you in

"Go on, s'pose you think there's maybe a ghost in your bedroomwhat measures do you take on getting home

"Take a stick" answered Alec, with ponderous reverence, "one about the length of a broomhandle. Now, the

first thing to do is to get the room clearedto do this you rush with your eyes closed into your study and turn

on the lightsnext, approaching the closet, carefully run the stick in the door three or four times. Then, if

nothing happens, you can look in. Always, always run the stick in viciously firstnever look first!"

"Of course, that's the ancient Celtic school," said Tom gravely. "Yesbut they usually pray first. Anyway,

"Oh, Amory, no!" cried Alec in horror. "That isn't the waythe bed requires different tacticslet the bed alone,

as you value your reasonif there is a ghost in the room and that's only about a third of the time, it is almost

"Of course you never look. You stand in the middle of the floor and before he knows what you're going to do

make a sudden leap for the bednever walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable

partonce in bed, you're safe; he may lie around under the bed all night, but you're safe as daylight. If you still

"Isn't it?" Alec beamed proudly. "All my own, toothe Sir Oliver Lodge of the new world."

Amory was enjoying college immensely again. The sense of going forward in a direct, determined line had

come back; youth was stirring and shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored enough surplus energy

"What's the idea of all this 'distracted' stuff, Amory?" asked Alec one day, and then as Amory pretended to be

cramped over his book in a daze: "Oh, don't try to act Burne, the mystic, to me." Amory looked up

"What?" mimicked Alec. "Are you trying to read yourself into a rhapsody withlet's see the book."

"Well, then, don't spoil it. If I enjoy going around telling people guilelessly that I think I'm a genius, let me do

it." "You're getting a reputation for being eccentric," said Alec, laughing, "if that's what you mean."

Amory finally prevailed, and Alec agreed to accept his face value in the presence of others if he was allowed

rest periods when they were alone; so Amory "ran it out" at a great rate, bringing the most eccentric

characters to dinner, wildeyed grad students, preceptors with strange theories of God and government, to the

As February became slashed by sun and moved cheerfully into March, Amory went several times to spend

weekends with Monsignor; once he took Burne, with great success, for he took equal pride and delight in

displaying them to each other. Monsignor took him several times to see Thornton Hancock, and once or twice

to the house of a Mrs. Lawrence, a type of Romehaunting American whom Amory liked immediately.

"Do you know," it ran, "that your third cousin, Clara Page, widowed six months and very poor, is living in

Philadelphia? I don't think you've ever met her, but I wish, as a favor to me, you'd go to see her. To my mind,

She was immemorial.... Amory wasn't good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man

was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husbandseeker, apart from the dull literature of

Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in Philadelphia he thought her steely blue eyes

held only happiness; a latent strength, a realism, was brought to its fullest development by the facts that she

was compelled to face. She was alone in the world, with two small children, little money, and, worst of all, a

host of friends. He saw her that winter in Philadelphia entertaining a houseful of men for an evening, when he

knew she had not a servant in the house except the little colored girl guarding the babies overhead. He saw

one of the greatest libertines in that city, a man who was habitually drunk and notorious at home and abroad,

sitting opposite her for an evening, discussing girls' boardingschools with a sort of innocent excitement.

What a twist Clara had to her mind! She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of the

thinnest air that ever floated through a drawingroom. The idea that the girl was povertystricken had

appealed to Amory's sense of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting to be told that 921 Ark Street

was in a miserable lane of hovels. He was even disappointed when it proved to be nothing of the sort. It was

an old house that had been in her husband's family for years. An elderly aunt, who objected to having it sold,

had put ten years' taxes with a lawyer and pranced off to Honolulu, leaving Clara to struggle with the

heatingproblem as best she could. So no wildhaired woman with a hungry baby at her breast and a sad

Amelialike look greeted him. Instead, Amory would have thought from his reception that she had not a care

in the world. A calm virility and a dreamy humor, marked contrasts to her levelheadednessinto these moods

she slipped sometimes as a refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to

stultify herself with such "household arts" as knitting and embroidery), yet immediately afterward pick up a

book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in her personality was the

golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into

the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her, until she made

of her prosy old uncle a man of quaint and meditative charm, metamorphosed the stray telegraph boy into a

Pucklike creature of delightful originality. At first this quality of hers somehow irritated Amory. He

considered his own uniqueness sufficient, and it rather embarrassed him when she tried to read new interests

into him for the benefit of what other adorers were present. He felt as if a polite but insistent stagemanager

were attempting to make him give a new interpretation of a part he had conned for years.

But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and an inebriated man and herself.... People tried

afterward to repeat her anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like nothing whatever.

They gave her a sort of innocent attention and the best smiles many of them had smiled for long; there were

Very occasionally Amory stayed for little halfhours after the rest of the court had gone, and they would

have bread and jam and tea late in the afternoon or "maplesugar lunches," as she called them, at night.

"You are remarkable, aren't you!" Amory was becoming trite from where he perched in the centre of the

"Not a bit," she answered. She was searching out napkins in the sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and

commonplace. One of those people who have no interest in anything but their children." "Tell that to

somebody else," scoffed Amory. "You know you're perfectly effulgent." He asked her the one thing that he

But eventually Adam probably told the bore all the things he thought about at night when the locusts sang in

the sandy grass, and he must have remarked patronizingly how different he was from Eve, forgetting how

different she was from him ... at any rate, Clara told Amory much about herself that evening. She had had a

harried life from sixteen on, and her education had stopped sharply with her leisure. Browsing in her library,

Amory found a tattered gray book out of which fell a yellow sheet that he impudently opened. It was a poem

that she had written at school about a gray convent wall on a gray day, and a girl with her cloak blown by the

wind sitting atop of it and thinking about the manycolored world. As a rule such sentiment bored him, but

this was done with so much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought a picture of Clara to his mind, of Clara

on such a cool, gray day with her keen blue eyes staring out, trying to see her tragedies come marching over

the gardens outside. He envied that poem. How he would have loved to have come along and seen her on the

wall and talked nonsense or romance to her, perched above him in the air. He began to be frightfully jealous

of everything about Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and women who flocked to drink deep of her

"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that's a pretty good average, don't you?" and she turned

to find something in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who could look

up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of the conversation, and yet not be irritating to

distraction. She did it constantly, with such a serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden

Through early March he took to going to Philadelphia for weekends. Almost always there was some one

else there and she seemed not anxious to see him alone, for many occasions presented themselves when a

word from her would have given him another delicious halfhour of adoration. But he fell gradually in love

and began to speculate wildly on marriage. Though this design flowed through his brain even to his lips, still

he knew afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he dreamt that it had come true and woke

up in a cold panic, for in his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone out of her hair and

platitudes falling insipidly from her changeling tongue. But she was the first fine woman he ever knew and

one of the few good people who ever interested him. She made her goodness such an asset. Amory had

decided that most good people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else distorted it to artificial

geniality, and of course there were the everpresent prig and Pharisee(but Amory never included them as

"Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are spontaneous in each of usor were originally."

"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?"

"Wellno, you have tremendous vanity, but it'll amuse the people who notice its preponderance."

"You're really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression when you think you've been slighted.

"Of course notI can never judge a man while he's talking. But I'm not through; the reason you have so little

real selfconfidence, 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

"And you say you're a weak character, that you've no will." "Not a bit of willI'm a slave to my emotions, to

"You are not!" She brought one little fist down onto the other. "You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one

"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

"Yes," objected Amory, "but isn't it lack of willpower to let my imagination shinny on the wrong side?"

"My dear boy, there's your big mistake. This has nothing to do with willpower; that's a crazy, useless word,

anyway; you lack judgmentthe judgment to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you

"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 factoryowner 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 himselfexcept, 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

"Well, don't scream it out. She ain't lookin' for no advice." "Ain't she beautiful!" (Enter a floorwalkersilence

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

"St. Cecelia," he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and the people turned and peered, and the priest

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

"I think," he said and his voice trembled, "that if I lost faith in you I'd lose faith in God."

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

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

"And I love youany latent greatness that I've got is ... oh, I can't talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in

"No," she said; "I'd never marry again. I've got my two children and I want myself for them. I like youI like

all clever men, you more than anybut you know me well enough to know that I'd never marry a clever man"

"It was the twilight," he said wonderingly. "I didn't feel as though I were speaking aloud. But I love youor

"You're not a lightweight, of all things," she said intently, taking his arm and opening wide her eyeshe could

"There's so much spring in the airthere's so much lazy sweetness in your heart."

"You're all fine now, and I feel glorious. Give me a cigarette. You've never seen me smoke, have you? Well, I

And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like two mad children gone wild with paleblue

"I'm going to the country for tomorrow," she announced, as she stood panting, safe beyond the flare of the

corner lamppost. "These days are too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel them more in the city."

"Oh, Clara!" Amory said; "what a devil you could have been if the Lord had just bent your soul a little the

"Maybe," she answered; "but I think not. I'm never really wild and never have been. That little outburst was

"Noyou're wrong again, how can a person of your own selfreputed brains be so constantly wrong about

me? I'm the opposite of everything spring ever stood for. It's unfortunate, if I happen to look like what

pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I assure you that if it weren't for my face I'd be a quiet nun in the

convent without"then she broke into a run and her raised voice floated back to him as he followed"my

She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand how another man might be preferred.

Often Amory met wives whom he had known as dibutantes, and looking intently at them imagined that he

But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara's bright soul still gleamed on the ways they had

"Golden, golden is the air" he chanted to the little pools of water.... "Golden is the air, golden notes from

golden mandolins, golden frets of golden violins, fair, oh, wearily fair.... Skeins from braided basket, mortals

may not hold; oh, what young extravagant God, who would know or ask it?... who could give such gold..."

Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while Amory talked and dreamed, war rolled

swiftly up the beach and washed the sands where Princeton played. Every night the gymnasium echoed as

platoon after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basketball markings. When Amory went to

Washington the next weekend he caught some of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the

Pullman car coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking aliensGreeks, he

guessed, or Russians. He thought how much easier patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much

easier it would have been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as the Confederacy fought. And he did no

sleeping that night, but listened to the aliens guffaw and snore while they filled the car with the heavy scent

In Princeton every one bantered in public and told themselves privately that their deaths at least would be

heroic. The literary students read Rupert Brooke passionately; the loungelizards worried over whether the

government would permit the Englishcut uniform for officers; a few of the hopelessly lazy wrote to the

obscure branches of the War Department, seeking an easy commission and a soft berth.

Then, after a week, Amory saw Burne and knew at once that argument would be futileBurne had come out as

a pacifist. The socialist magazines, a great smattering of Tolstoi, and his own intense longing for a cause that

would bring out whatever strength lay in him, had finally decided him to preach peace as a subjective ideal.

"When the German army entered Belgium," he began, "if the inhabitants had gone peaceably about their

"I know," Amory interrupted, "I've heard it all. But I'm not going to talk propaganda with you. There's a

chance that you're rightbut even so we're hundreds of years before the time when nonresistance can touch us

"Just one thingI don't ask you to think of your family or friends, because I know they don't count a picayune

with you beside your sense of dutybut, Burne, how do you know that the magazines you read and the

"How do you know they aren't all proGermanjust a lot of weak oneswith GermanJewish names."

"That's the chance, of course," he said slowly. "How much or how little I'm taking this stand because of

propaganda I've heard, I don't know; naturally I think that it's my most innermost convictionit seems a path

"But think of the cheapness of itno one's really going to martyr you for being a pacifistit's just going to throw

"You're one man, Burne going to talk to people who won't listen with all God's given you."

"That's what Stephen must have thought many years ago. But he preached his sermon and they killed him. He

probably thought as he was dying what a waste it all was. But you see, I've always felt that Stephen's death

was the thing that occurred to Paul on the road to Damascus, and sent him to preach the word of Christ all

"That's allthis is my particular duty. Even if right now I'm just a pawnjust sacrificed. God! Amoryyou don't

"Well, I can't say anything elseI get to the end of all the logic about nonresistance, and there, like an

excluded middle, stands the huge spectre of man as he is and always will be. And this spectre stands right

beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi's, and the other logical necessity of Nietzsche's" Amory broke off

As he walked away it seemed to Amory that the look in his face bore a great resemblance to that in Kerry's

when he had said goodby under Blair Arch two years before. Amory wondered unhappily why he could

"Burne's a fanatic," he said to Tom, "and he's dead wrong and, I'm inclined to think, just an unconscious

pawn in the hands of anarchistic publishers and Germanpaid rag waversbut he haunts mejust leaving

Burne left in a quietly dramatic manner a week later. He sold all his possessions and came down to the room

to say goodby, with a battered old bicycle, on which he intended to ride to his home in Pennsylvania.

"Peter the Hermit bidding farewell to Cardinal Richelieu," suggested Alec, who was lounging in the

But Amory was not in a mood for that, and as he saw Burne's long legs propel his ridiculous bicycle out of

sight beyond Alexander Hall, he knew he was going to have a bad week. Not that he doubted the

warGermany stood for everything repugnant to him; for materialism and the direction of tremendous

licentious force; it was just that Burne's face stayed in his memory and he was sick of the hysteria he was

"What on earth is the use of suddenly running down Goethe," he declared to Alec and Tom. "Why write

books to prove he started the waror that that stupid, overestimated Schiller is a demon in disguise?"

"Have you ever read anything of theirs?" asked Tom shrewdly. "No," Amory admitted.

"People will shout," said Alec quietly, "but Goethe's on his same old shelf in the libraryto bore any one that

"Infantry or aviation, I can't make up my mindI hate mechanics, but then of course aviation's the thing for

"I feel as Amory does," said Tom. "Infantry or aviationaviation sounds like the romantic side of the war, of

courselike cavalry used to be, you know; but like Amory I don't know a horsepower from a pistonrod."

Somehow Amory's dissatisfaction with his lack of enthusiasm culminated in an attempt to put the blame for

the whole war on the ancestors of his generation ... all the people who cheered for Germany in 1870.... All the

materialists rampant, all the idolizers of German science and efficiency. So he sat one day in an English

lecture and heard "Locksley Hall" quoted and fell into a brown study with contempt for Tennyson and all he

"Victorians, Victorians, who never learned to weep Who sowed the bitter harvest that your children go to

scribbled Amory in his notebook. The lecturer was saying something about Tennyson's solidity and fifty

heads were bent to take notes. Amory turned over to a fresh page and began scrawling again.

"They shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about, They shuddered when the waltz came in and

"And entitled A Song in the Time of Order," came the professor's voice, droning far away. "Time of

Order"Good Lord! Everything crammed in the box and the Victorians sitting on the lid smiling serenely....

With Browning in his Italian villa crying bravely: "All's for the best." Amory scribbled again.

"You knelt up in the temple and he bent to hear you pray, You thanked him for your 'glorious

Why could he never get more than a couplet at a time? Now he needed something to rhyme with:

"You met your children in your home'I've fixed it up!" you cried, Took your fifty years of Europe, and then

"That was to a great extent Tennyson's idea," came the lecturer's voice. "Swinburne's Song in the Time of

Order might well have been Tennyson's title. He idealized order against chaos, against waste."

At last Amory had it. He turned over another page and scrawled vigorously for the twenty minutes that was

left of the hour. Then he walked up to the desk and deposited a page torn out of his notebook.

"Here's a poem to the Victorians, sir," he said coldly. The professor picked it up curiously while Amory

Early April slipped by in a hazea haze of long evenings on the club veranda with the graphophone playing

"Poor Butterfly" inside ... for "Poor Butterfly" had been the song of that last year. The war seemed scarcely to

touch them and it might have been one of the senior springs of the past, except for the drilling every other

afternoon, yet Amory realized poignantly that this was the last spring under the old rigime.

"This is the great protest against the superman," said Amory. "I suppose so," Alec agreed.

"He's absolutely irreconcilable with any Utopia. As long as he occurs, there's trouble and all the latent evil

"That's all. I think the worst thing to contemplate is thisit's all happened before, how soon will it happen

again? Fifty years after Waterloo Napoleon was as much a hero to English school children as Wellington.

"Time, damn it, and the historian. If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or

Then the night came that was to be the last. Tom and Amory, bound in the morning for different

trainingcamps, paced the shadowy walks as usual and seemed still to see around them the faces of the men

They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the

"You know," whispered Tom, "what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted

A last burst of singing flooded up from Blair Archbroken voices for some long parting.

"And what we leave here is more than this class; it's the whole heritage of youth. We're just one

generationwe're breaking all the links that seemed to bind us here to topbooted and highstocked

generations. We've walked arm and arm with Burr and LightHorse Harry Lee through half these deepblue

nights." "That's what they are," Tom tangented off, "deep bluea bit of color would spoil them, make them

exotic. Spires, against a sky that's a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofsit hurts ... rather"

"Goodby, Aaron Burr," Amory called toward deserted Nassau Hall, "you and I knew strange corners of

"The torches are out," whispered Tom. "Ah, Messalina, the long shadows are building minarets on the

For an instant the voices of freshman year surged around them and then they looked at each other with faint

The last light fades and drifts across the landthe low, long land, the sunny land of spires; the ghosts of

evening tune again their lyres and wander singing in a plaintive band down the long corridors of trees; pale

fires echo the night from tower top to tower: Oh, sleep that dreams, and dream that never tires, press from the

No more to wait the twilight of the moon in this sequestered vale of star and spire, for one eternal morning of

desire passes to time and earthy afternoon. Here, Heraclitus, did you find in fire and shifting things the

prophecy you hurled down the dead years; this midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers,

A letter dated January, 1918, written by Monsignor Darcy to Amory, who is a second lieutenant in the 171st

All you need tell me of yourself is that you still are; for the rest I merely search back in a restive memory, a

thermometer that records only fevers, and match you with what I was at your age. But men will chatter and

you and I will still shout our futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly curtain falls plump!

upon our bobbing heads. But you are starting the spluttering magiclantern show of life with much the same

array of slides as I had, so I need to write you if only to shriek the colossal stupidity of people....

This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew,

never again will we meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine

Amory, lately I reread Fschylus and there in the divine irony of the "Agamemnon" I find the only answer to

this bitter ageall the world tumbled about our ears, and the closest parallel ages back in that hopeless

resignation. There are times when I think of the men out there as Roman legionaries, miles from their corrupt

city, stemming back the hordes ... hordes a little more menacing, after all, than the corrupt city ... another

blind blow at the race, furies that we passed with ovations years ago, over whose corpses we bleated

And afterward an outandout materialistic worldand the Catholic Church. I wonder where you'll fit in. Of

one thing I'm sureCeltic you'll live and Celtic you'll die; so if you don't use heaven as a continual referendum

Amory, I've discovered suddenly that I'm an old man. Like all old men, I've had dreams sometimes and I'm

going to tell you of them. I've enjoyed imagining that you were my son, that perhaps when I was young I

went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I came to, had no recollection of it ... it's the paternal

Sometimes I think that the explanation of our deep resemblance is some common ancestor, and I find that the

only blood that the Darcys and the O'Haras have in common is that of the O'Donahues ... Stephen was his

When the lightning strikes one of us it strikes both: you had hardly arrived at the port of embarkation when I

got my papers to start for Rome, and I am waiting every moment to be told where to take ship. Even before

you get this letter I shall be on the ocean; then will come your turn. You went to war as a gentleman should,

just as you went to school and college, because it was the thing to do. It's better to leave the blustering and

Do you remember that weekend last March when you brought Burne Holiday from Princeton to see me?

What a magnificent boy he is! It gave me a frightful shock afterward when you wrote that he thought me

splendid; how could he be so deceived? Splendid is the one thing that neither you nor I are. We are many

other thingswe're extraordinary, we're clever, we could be said, I suppose, to be brilliant. We can attract

people, we can make atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celtic subtleties, we can almost

I am going to Rome with a wonderful dossier and letters of introduction that cover every capital in Europe,

and there will be "no small stir" when I get there. How I wish you were with me! This sounds like a rather

cynical paragraph, not at all the sort of thing that a middleaged clergyman should write to a youth about to

depart for the war; the only excuse is that the middleaged clergyman is talking to himself. There are deep

things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. We have great faith, though yours at present is

uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, a childlike

I have written a keen for you which follows. I am sorry your cheeks are not up to the description I have

AmoryAmory I feel, somehow, that this is all; one or both of us is not going to last out this war.... I've been

trying to tell you how much this reincarnation of myself in you has meant in the last few years ... curiously

alike we are ... curiously unlike. Goodby, dear boy, and God be with you. THAYER DARCY.

Amory moved forward on the deck until he found a stool under an electric light. He searched in his pocket for

A letter from Amory, headed "Brest, March 11th, 1919," to Lieutenant T. P. D'Invilliers, Camp Gordon, Ga.

We meet in Manhattan on the 30th of this very mo.; we then proceed to take a very sporty apartment, you and

I and Alec, who is at me elbow as I write. I don't know what I'm going to do but I have a vague dream of

going into politics. Why is it that the pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into

politics and in the U. S. A. we leave it to the muckers?raised in the ward, educated in the assembly and sent

to Congress, fatpaunched bundles of corruption, devoid of "both ideas and ideals" as the debaters used to

say. Even forty years ago we had good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a million and

"show what we are made of." Sometimes I wish I'd been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb

Since poor Beatrice died I'll probably have a little money, but very darn little. I can forgive mother almost

everything except the fact that in a sudden burst of religiosity toward the end, she left half of what remained

to be spent in stainedglass windows and seminary endowments. Mr. Barton, my lawyer, writes me that my

thousands are mostly in street railways and that the said Street R.R.s are losing money because of the

fivecent fares. Imagine a salary list that gives $350 a month to a man that can't read and write!yet I believe

in it, even though I've seen what was once a sizable fortune melt away between speculation, extravagance, the

At any rate we'll have really knockout roomsyou can get a job on some fashion magazine, and Alec can go

into the Zinc Company or whatever it is that his people ownhe's looking over my shoulder and he says it's a

brass company, but I don't think it matters much, do you? There's probably as much corruption in zincmade

money as brassmade money. As for the wellknown Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were

sure enough about anything to risk telling any one else about it. There is no more dangerous gift to posterity

Tom, why don't you become a Catholic? Of course to be a good one you'd have to give up those violent

intrigues you used to tell me about, but you'd write better poetry if you were linked up to tall golden

candlesticks and long, even chants, and even if the American priests are rather burgeois, as Beatrice used to

say, still you need only go to the sporty churches, and I'll introduce you to Monsignor Darcy who really is a

Kerry's death was a blow, so was Jesse's to a certain extent. And I have a great curiosity to know what queer

corner of the world has swallowed Burne. Do you suppose he's in prison under some false name? I confess

that the war instead of making me orthodox, which is the correct reaction, has made me a passionate agnostic.

The Catholic Church has had its wings clipped so often lately that its part was timidly negligible, and they

I've only discovered one soldier who passed through the muchadvertised spiritual crisis, like this fellow,

Donald Hankey, and the one I knew was already studying for the ministry, so he was ripe for it. I honestly

think that's all pretty much rot, though it seemed to give sentimental comfort to those at home; and may make

fathers and mothers appreciate their children. This crisisinspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at

But usyou and me and Alecoh, we'll get a Jap butler and dress for dinner and have wine on the table and lead

a contemplative, emotionless life until we decide to use machineguns with the property ownersor throw

bombs with the Bolshevik God! Tom, I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror

The place at Lake Geneva is now for rent but when I land I'm going West to see Mr. Barton and get some

The time is February. The place is a large, dainty bedroom in the Connage house on Sixtyeighth Street, New

York. A girl's room: pink walls and curtains and a pink bedspread on a creamcolored bed. Pink and cream

are the motifs of the room, but the only article of furniture in full view is a luxurious dressingtable with a

glass top and a threesided mirror. On the walls there is an expensive print of "Cherry Ripe," a few polite

Great disorder consisting of the following items: (1) seven or eight empty cardboard boxes, with tissuepaper

tongues hanging panting from their mouths; (2) an assortment of street dresses mingled with their sisters of

the evening, all upon the table, all evidently new; (3) a roll of tulle, which has lost its dignity and wound itself

tortuously around everything in sight, and (4) upon the two small chairs, a collection of lingerie that beggars

description. One would enjoy seeing the bill called forth by the finery displayed and one is possessed by a

desire to see the princess for whose benefit Look! There's some one! Disappointment! This is only a maid

hunting for something she lifts a heap from a chair Not there; another heap, the dressingtable, the chiffonier

drawers. She brings to light several beautiful chemises and an amazing pajama but this does not satisfy

Now, we are getting warm. This is Alec's mother, Mrs. Connage, ample, dignified, rouged to the dowager

point and quite worn out. Her lips move significantly as she looks for IT. Her search is less thorough than the

maid's but there is a touch of fury in it, that quite makes up for its sketchiness. She stumbles on the tulle and

More chatter outside and a girl's voice, a very spoiled voice, says: "Of all the stupid people"

After a pause a third seeker enters, not she of the spoiled voice, but a younger edition. This is Cecelia

Connage, sixteen, pretty, shrewd, and constitutionally goodhumored. She is dressed for the evening in a

gown the obvious simplicity of which probably bores her. She goes to the nearest pile, selects a small pink

CECELIA: I've got it! (She sees herself in the mirror of the dressingtable and commences to shimmy

ROSALIND: (Outside) What are you doingtrying it on? (CECELIA ceases and goes out carrying the

From the other door, enters ALEC CONNAGE. He looks around quickly and in a huge voice shouts: Mama!

There is a chorus of protest from next door and encouraged he starts toward it, but is repelled by another

MRS. CONNAGE: Well, you can show him where his room is. Tell him I'm sorry that I can't meet him now.

ALEC: He's heard a lot about you all. I wish you'd hurry. Father's telling him all about the war and he's

CECELIA: (Seating herself high upon lingerie) How do you meantemperamental? You used to say that

MRS. CONNAGE: Of course, I want to. But I think it's so childish of you to leave a perfectly good home to

go and live with two other boys in some impossible apartment. I hope it isn't in order that you can all drink as

much as you want. (She pauses.) He'll be a little neglected tonight. This is Rosalind's week, you see. When a

CECELIA: Well, Rosalind has still to meet the man she can't outdistance. Honestly, Alec, she treats men

terribly. She abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their facesand they come

CECELIA: They hate it. She's ashe's a sort of vampire, I thinkand she can make girls do what she wants

CECELIA: Not particularly well. Oh, she's averagesmokes sometimes, drinks punch, frequently kissedOh,

(And now ROSALIND enters. ROSALIND isutterly ROSALIND. She is one of those girls who need never

make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are

usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by

If ROSALIND could be spoiled the process would have been complete by this time, and as a matter of fact,

her disposition is not all it should be; she wants what she wants when she wants it and she is prone to make

every one around her pretty miserable when she doesn't get itbut in the true sense she is not spoiled. Her fresh

enthusiasm, her will to grow and learn, her endless faith in the inexhaustibility of romance, her courage and

There are long periods when she cordially loathes her whole family. She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy

is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others. She loves shocking stories: she has that coarse streak that

usually goes with natures that are both fine and big. She wants people to like her, but if they do not it never

The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men. ROSALIND had been disappointed in man

after man as individuals, but she had great faith in man as a sex. Women she detested. They represented

qualities that she felt and despised in herselfincipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty dishonesty.

She once told a roomful of her mother's friends that the only excuse for women was the necessity for a

disturbing element among men. She danced exceptionally well, drew cleverly but hastily, and had a startling

But all criticism of ROSALIND ends in her beauty. There was that shade of glorious yellow hair, the desire

to imitate which supports the dye industry. There was the eternal kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual, and

utterly disturbing. There were gray eyes and an unimpeachable skin with two spots of vanishing color. She

was slender and athletic, without underdevelopment, and it was a delight to watch her move about a room,

A last qualificationher vivid, instant personality escaped that conscious, theatrical quality that AMORY had

found in ISABELLE. MONSIGNOR DARCY would have been quite up a tree whether to call her a

personality or a personage. She was perhaps the delicious, inexpressible, onceinacentury blend.

On the night of her dibut she is, for all her strange, stray wisdom, quite like a happy little girl. Her mother's

maid has just done her hair, but she has decided impatiently that she can do a better job herself. She is too

nervous just now to stay in one place. To that we owe her presence in this littered room. She is going to

speak. ISABELLE'S alto tones had been like a violin, but if you could hear ROSALIND, you would say her

ROSALIND: Honestly, there are only two costumes in the world that I really enjoy being in (Combing her

hair at the dressingtable.) One's a hoop skirt with pantaloons; the other's a onepiece bathingsuit. I'm quite

CECELIA: (Cynically) You're glad so you can get married and live on Long Island with the fast younger

married set. You want life to be a chain of flirtation with a man for every link.

ROSALIND: Cecelia, darling, you don't know what a trial it is to belike me. I've got to keep my face like

steel in the street to keep men from winking at me. If I laugh hard from a front row in the theatre, the

comedian plays to me for the rest of the evening. If I drop my voice, my eyes, my handkerchief at a dance,

ROSALIND: The unfortunate part is that the only men who interest me at all are the totally ineligible ones.

ROSALIND: Sometimes when I've felt particularly radiant I've thought, why should this be wasted on one

CECELIA: Often when you're particularly sulky, I've wondered why it should all be wasted on just one

family. (Getting up.) I think I'll go down and meet Mr. Amory Blaine. I like temperamental men.

ROSALIND: There aren't any. Men don't know how to be really angry or really happyand the ones that do,

ROSALIND: (With a scornful smile) Engaged? Why, you little lunatic! If mother heard you talking like that

CECELIA: You won't tell her, though, because I know things I could telland you're too selfish!

ROSALIND: (A little annoyed) Run along, little girl! Who are you engaged to, the iceman? the man that

(Exit CECELIA. ROSALIND finished her hair and rises, humming. She goes up to the mirror and starts to

dance in front of it on the soft carpet. She watches not her feet, but her eyesnever casually but always

intently, even when she smiles. The door suddenly opens and then slams behind AMORY, very cool and

SHE: (Smiling radiantly) Oh, you're Amory Blaine, aren't you? HE: (Regarding her closely) And you're

SHE: I'm going to call you Amoryoh, come init's all rightmother'll be right in(under her breath)

SHE: Yesall those things. (She crosses to the bureau.) See, here's my rougeeye pencils.

SHE: Oh, it's not a corporationit's just "Rosalind, Unlimited." Fiftyone shares, name, goodwill, and

SHE: Well, Amory, you don't minddo you? When I meet a man that doesn't bore me to death after two

SHE: No, youyou go onyou've made me talk about myself. That's against the rules.

SHE: My own rulesbut you Oh, Amory, I hear you're brilliant. The family expects so much of you.

SHE: Alec said you'd taught him to think. Did you? I didn't believe any one could.

SHE: Hush! Please don't fall in love with my mouthhair, eyes, shoulders, slippersbut not my mouth.

SHE: We haven't the same standards of time as other people. HE: Already it'sother people.

HE: No, I'm romantica sentimental person thinks things will lasta romantic person hopes against hope that

SHE: And you're not? (With her eyes halfclosed.) You probably flatter yourself that that's a superior

(She goes quietly to the chiffonier, takes out a cigarettecase and hides it in the side drawer of a desk. Her

MRS. CONNAGE: GoodI've been wanting to speak to you alone before we go downstairs.

MRS. CONNAGE: You can't do anything without it. This is our last year in this houseand unless things

MRS. CONNAGE: So I ask you to please mind me in several things I've put down in my notebook. The

first one is: don't disappear with young men. There may be a time when it's valuable, but at present I want

you on the dancefloor where I can find you. There are certain men I want to have you meet and I don't like

finding you in some corner of the conservatory exchanging silliness with any oneor listening to it.

ROSALIND: (Sarcastically) Yes, listening to it is better. MRS. CONNAGE: And don't waste a lot of time

with the college setlittle boys nineteen and twenty years old. I don't mind a prom or a football game, but

staying away from advantageous parties to eat in little cafis downtown with Tom, Dick, and Harry

ROSALIND: (Offering her code, which is, in its way, quite as high as her mother's) Mother, it's doneyou

MRS. CONNAGE: (Paying no attention) There are several bachelor friends of your father's that I want you

ROSALIND: Oh, quite all rightthey know life and are so adorably tired looking (shakes her head)but they

MRS. CONNAGE: I haven't met Mr. Blainebut I don't think you'll care for him. He doesn't sound like a

ROSALIND: (Sighs) Yes, I suppose some day I'll marry a ton of itout of sheer boredom.

MRS. CONNAGE: (Referring to notebook) I had a wire from Hartford. Dawson Ryder is coming up. Now

there's a young man I like, and he's floating in money. It seems to me that since you seem tired of Howard

Gillespie you might give Mr. Ryder some encouragement. This is the third time he's been up in a month.

ROSALIND: How did you know I was tired of Howard Gillespie? MRS. CONNAGE: The poor boy looks

ROSALIND goes to the glass where she gazes at herself with great satisfaction. She kisses her hand and

touches her mirrored mouth with it. Then she turns out the lights and leaves the room. Silence for a moment.

A few chords from the piano, the discreet patter of faint drums, the rustle of new silk, all blend on the

staircase outside and drift in through the partly opened door. Bundled figures pass in the lighted hall. The

laughter heard below becomes doubled and multiplied. Then some one comes in, closes the door, and

CECELIA. She goes to the chiffonier, looks in the drawers, hesitatesthen to the desk whence she takes the

cigarettecase and extracts one. She lights it and then, puffing and blowing, walks toward the mirror.)

CECELIA: (In tremendously sophisticated accents) Oh, yes, coming out is such a farce nowadays, you

know. One really plays around so much before one is seventeen, that it's positively anticlimax. (Shaking

hands with a visionary middleaged nobleman.) Yes, your graceI b'lieve I've heard my sister speak of you.

Have a puffthey're very good. They'rethey're Coronas. You don't smoke? What a pity! The king doesn't

(So she dances around the room to a tune from downstairs, her arms outstretched to an imaginary partner,

The corner of a den downstairs, filled by a very comfortable leather lounge. A small light is on each side

above, and in the middle, over the couch hangs a painting of a very old, very dignified gentleman, period

ROSALIND is seated on the lounge and on her left is HOWARD GILLESPIE, a vapid youth of about

GILLESPIE: Three weeks ago you used to say that you liked me because I was so blasi, so indifferentI still

ROSALIND: But not about me. I used to like you because you had brown eyes and thin legs.

GILLESPIE: (Helplessly) They're still thin and brown. You're a vampire, that's all.

ROSALIND: The only thing I know about vamping is what's on the piano score. What confuses men is that

I'm perfectly natural. I used to think you were never jealous. Now you follow me with your eyes wherever I

GILLESPIE: And you haven't kissed me for two weeks. I had an idea that after a girl was kissed she

ROSALIND: Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.

ROSALIND: About as usual. There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and

deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If

Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, every one knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of

1919 brags the same every one knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl

ROSALIND: (Leaning forward confidentially) For that first moment, when he's interested. There is a

momentOh, just before the first kiss, a whispered wordsomething that makes it worth while.

ROSALIND: Then after that you make him talk about himself. Pretty soon he thinks of nothing but being

(Enter DAWSON RYDER, twentysix, handsome, wealthy, faithful to his own, a bore perhaps, but steady

ROSALIND: Well, Dawson, so you recognize me. Now I know I haven't got too much paint on. Mr. Ryder,

(They shake hands and GILLESPIE leaves, tremendously downcast.) RYDER: Your party is certainly a

ROSALIND: Is it I haven't seen it lately. I'm weary Do you mind sitting out a minute?

RYDER: MindI'm delighted. You know I loathe this "rushing" idea. See a girl yesterday, today,

ROSALIND: Because you know I'm an awful proposition. Any one who marries me will have his hands full.

ROSALIND: Oh, yes, I amespecially to the people nearest to me. (She rises.) Come, let's go. I've changed

CECELIA: Good heavens, nowith whom would I begin the next dance? (Sighs.) There's no color in a dance

ALEC: I did, but since seeing these girlsI don't know. I'm awfully attached to Amory. He's sensitive and I

ALEC: (Still thoughtfully) She won't marry him, but a girl doesn't have to marry a man to break his heart.

ALEC: Why, you coldblooded little kitty. It's lucky for some that the Lord gave you a pug nose.

ALEC: (Brilliantly) Of course you've come to the best people to find out. She'd naturally be with us.

MRS. CONNAGE: Her father has marshalled eight bachelor millionaires to meet her.

ALEC: You might form a squad and march through the halls. MRS. CONNAGE: I'm perfectly seriousfor all

I know she may be at the Cocoanut Grove with some football player on the night of her dibut. You look left

GILLESPIE: Rosalind Once more I ask you. Don't you care a blessed thing about me?

AMORY: (Spicily) Approximately. But I always felt that I'd rather be provincial hottamale than soup

AMORY: Oh, yesher name was Isabellenothing at all to her except what I read into her.

AMORY: Finally I convinced her that she was smarter than I wasthen she threw me over. Said I was critical

ROSALIND: Oh, are you going to commence the "pyramid" story? AMORY: NoI was going to make it

French. I was Louis XIV and you were one of mymy (Changing his tone.) Supposewe fell in love.

ROSALIND: (Sadly) Oh, nothingonly I want sentiment, real sentimentand I never find it.

(Some one has opened a door and the music of a waltz surges into the room. ROSALIND rises.)

(Her brother strolls in, starts and then in a loud voice says: "Oh, excuse me," and goes.)

ROSALIND: (Her lips scarcely stirring) Don't let me goI don't care who knows what I do.

ROSALIND: I love younow. (They part.) OhI am very youthful, thank Godand rather beautiful, thank

Godand happy, thank God, thank God (She pauses and then, in an odd burst of prophecy, adds) Poor

Within two weeks Amory and Rosalind were deeply and passionately in love. The critical qualities which had

spoiled for each of them a dozen romances were dulled by the great wave of emotion that washed over them.

"It may be an insane loveaffair," she told her anxious mother, "but it's not inane."

The wave swept Amory into an advertising agency early in March, where he alternated between astonishing

bursts of rather exceptional work and wild dreams of becoming suddenly rich and touring Italy with Rosalind.

They were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly every eveningalways in a sort of breathless

hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and

flame. But the spell became a trance, seemed to increase from day to day; they began to talk of marrying in

Julyin June. All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were

nullifiedtheir senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former loveaffairs seemed faintly

For the second time in his life Amory had had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably histhe pageantry and carnival of

rich dusk and dim streets ... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into

the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and

singinghe moved in a halfdream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him

with eager feet from every corner.... How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad

footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than

wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds

The room was in darkness except for the faint glow of Tom's cigarette where he lounged by the open

window. As the door shut behind him, Amory stood a moment with his back against it. "Hello, Benvenuto

"I loathed it as usual!" The momentary vision of the bustling agency was displaced quickly by another

"I can't tell you," repeated Amory, "just how wonderful she is. I don't want you to know. I don't want any one

Another sigh came from the windowquite a resigned sigh. "She's life and hope and happiness, my whole

He sat in the big chair and held out his arms so that she could nestle inside them.

"I knew you'd come tonight," she said softly, "like summer, just when I needed you most ... darling ...

"Don't!" she cried. "It hurts when you reproach yourself for what you can't give me. I've got your precious

"I want to belong to you. I want your people to be my people. I want to have your babies."

"No, I'll do what you want. We're younot me. Oh, you're so much a part, so much all of me..."

"I'm so happy that I'm frightened. Wouldn't it be awful if this waswas the high point?..."

"Beauty and love pass, I know.... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty

"Beauty means the agony of sacrifice and the end of agony...." "And, Amory, we're beautiful, I know. I'm

"I'm not his, I'm yours. Amory, I belong to you. For the first time I regret all the other kisses; now I know

Then they would smoke and he would tell her about his day at the officeand where they might live.

Sometimes, when he was particularly loquacious, she went to sleep in his arms, but he loved that Rosalindall

Rosalinds as he had never in the world loved any one else. Intangibly fleeting, unrememberable hours.

One day Amory and Howard Gillespie meeting by accident downtown took lunch together, and Amory

heard a story that delighted him. Gillespie after several cocktails was in a talkative mood; he began by telling

He had gone with her on a swimming party up in Westchester County, and some one mentioned that Annette

Kellerman had been there one day on a visit and had dived from the top of a rickety, thirtyfoot

summerhouse. Immediately Rosalind insisted that Howard should climb up with her to see what it looked

like. A minute later, as he sat and dangled his feet on the edge, a form shot by him; Rosalind, her arms spread

"Of course I had to go, after thatand I nearly killed myself. I thought I was pretty good to even try it. Nobody

else in the party tried it. Well, afterward Rosalind had the nerve to ask me why I stooped over when I dove. 'It

didn't make it any easier,' she said, 'it just took all the courage out of it.' I ask you, what can a man do with a

Gillespie failed to understand why Amory was smiling delightedly all through lunch. He thought perhaps he

Again the library of the Connage house. ROSALIND is alone, sitting on the lounge staring very moodily and

unhappily at nothing. She has changed perceptiblyshe is a trifle thinner for one thing; the light in her eyes is

Her mother comes in, muffled in an operacloak. She takes in ROSALIND with a nervous glance.

MRS. CONNAGE: Alec is coming up to take me to this Barrie play, "Et tu, Brutus." (She perceives that she

MRS. CONNAGE: (Sarcastically) You have so many admirers lately that I couldn't imagine which one.

(ROSALIND doesn't answer.) Dawson Ryder is more patient than I thought he'd be. You haven't given him

ROSALIND: (With a very weary expression that is quite new to her face.) Motherplease

MRS. CONNAGE: Oh, I won't interfere. You've already wasted over two months on a theoretical genius

who hasn't a penny to his name, but go ahead, waste your life on him. I won't interfere.

ROSALIND: (As if repeating a tiresome lesson) You know he has a little incomeand you know he's earning

MRS. CONNAGE: And it wouldn't buy your clothes. (She pauses but ROSALIND makes no reply.) I have

your best interests at heart when I tell you not to take a step you'll spend your days regretting. It's not as if

your father could help you. Things have been hard for him lately and he's an old man. You'd be dependent

absolutely on a dreamer, a nice, wellborn boy, but a dreamermerely clever. (She implies that this quality in

(A maid appears, announces Mr. Blaine who follows immediately. AMORY'S friends have been telling him

for ten days that he "looks like the wrath of God," and he does. As a matter of fact he has not been able to eat

MRS. CONNAGE: (Not unkindly) Good evening, Amory. (AMORY and ROSALIND exchange glancesand

ALEC comes in. ALEC'S attitude throughout has been neutral. He believes in his heart that the marriage

would make AMORY mediocre and ROSALIND miserable, but he feels a great sympathy for both of them.)

ALEC: Yeah, just saw him. How's the advertising today? Write some brilliant copy?

AMORY: Oh, it's about the same. I got a raise (Every one looks at him rather eagerly) of two dollars a week.

MRS. CONNAGE: Come, Alec, I hear the car. (A good night, rather chilly in sections. After MRS.

CONNAGE and ALEC go out there is a pause. ROSALIND still stares moodily at the fireplace. AMORY

(They kiss. Another pause and then she seizes his hand, covers it with kisses and holds it to her breast.)

ROSALIND: (Sadly) I love your hands, more than anything. I see them often when you're away from meso

AMORY: Rosalind, another night of this and I'll go to pieces. You've been this way four days now. You've

got to be more encouraging or I can't work or eat or sleep. (He looks around helplessly as if searching for new

words to clothe an old, shopworn phrase.) We'll have to make a start. I like having to make a start together.

(His forced hopefulness fades as he sees her unresponsive.) What's the matter? (He gets up suddenly and

starts to pace the floor.) It's Dawson Ryder, that's what it is. He's been working on your nerves. You've been

with him every afternoon for a week. People come and tell me they've seen you together, and I have to smile

and nod and pretend it hasn't the slightest significance for me. And you won't tell me anything as it develops.

AMORY: Don't talk that way; you frighten me. It sounds as if we weren't going to have each other. (She

cries a little and rising from the couch goes to the armchair.) I've felt all afternoon that things were worse. I

ROSALIND: Don't be a silly idiot. You know you're the only man I've ever loved, ever will love.

AMORY: Rosalind, you can't be thinking of marrying some one else. Tell me! You leave me in the dark. I

ROSALIND: It's justus. We're pitiful, that's all. The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will

ROSALIND: Ohit is Dawson Ryder. He's so reliable, I almost feel that he'd be aa background.

ROSALIND: Wellhere's one little thing. There was a little poor boy we met in Rye Tuesday afternoonand,

oh, Dawson took him on his lap and talked to him and promised him an Indian suitand next day he

remembered and bought itand, oh, it was so sweet and I couldn't help thinking he'd be so nice toto our

ROSALIND: (Commencing to sob again) It's been so perfectyou and I. So like a dream that I'd longed for

and never thought I'd find. The first real unselfishness I've ever felt in my life. And I can't see it fade out in a

AMORY: Yes, women can do thatbut not men. I'd remember always, not the beauty of it while it lasted, but

AMORY: All the years never to see you, never to kiss you, just a gate shut and barredyou don't dare be my

ROSALIND: NonoI'm taking the hardest course, the strongest course. Marrying you would be a failure

ROSALIND: (With a burst of insight) Amory, you're young. I'm young. People excuse us now for our poses

and vanities, for treating people like Sancho and yet getting away with it. They excuse us now. But you've got

ROSALIND: No, not that. There was a poem I read somewhereyou'll say Ella Wheeler Wilcox and

ROSALIND: Amory, I'm yoursyou know it. There have been times in the last month I'd have been

completely yours if you'd said so. But I can't marry you and ruin both our lives.

(AMORY with his head sunk in his hands does not move. The life seems suddenly gone out of him.)

ROSALIND: Lover! Lover! I can't do with you, and I can't imagine life without you.

AMORY: Rosalind, we're on each other's nerves. It's just that we're both highstrung, and this week

(His voice is curiously old. She crosses to him and taking his face in her hands, kisses him.)

ROSALIND: I can't, Amory. I can't be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat,

ROSALIND: Oh, darling, go Don't make it harder! I can't stand it AMORY: (His face drawn, his voice

AMORY: I'm afraid I can't if you love me. You're afraid of taking two years' knocks with me.

AMORY: (A little hysterically) I can't give you up! I can't, that's all! I've got to have you!

ROSALIND: Oh, don't ask me. You know I'm old in some waysin otherswell, I'm just a little girl. I like

sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulnessand I dread responsibility. I don't want to think about pots and

kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the summer.

ROSALIND: That's just why it has to end. Drifting hurts too much. We can't have any more scenes like this.

(She draws his ring from her finger and hands it to him. Their eyes blind again with tears.)

AMORY: (His lips against her wet cheek) Don't! Keep it, pleaseoh, don't break my heart!

(He goes to the door, fumbles for the knob, finds itshe sees him throw back his headand he is gone. Goneshe

half starts from the lounge and then sinks forward on her face into the pillows.) ROSALIND: Oh, God, I

want to die! (After a moment she rises and with her eyes closed feels her way to the door. Then she turns and

looks once more at the room. Here they had sat and dreamed: that tray she had so often filled with matches

for him; that shade that they had discreetly lowered one long Sunday afternoon. Mistyeyed she stands and

(And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time, Rosalind feels that she has lost something, she

THE KNICKERBOCKER BAR, beamed upon by Maxfield Parrish's jovial, colorful "Old King Cole," was

well crowded. Amory stopped in the entrance and looked at his wristwatch; he wanted particularly to know

the time, for something in his mind that catalogued and classified liked to chip things off cleanly. Later it

would satisfy him in a vague way to be able to think "that thing ended at exactly twenty minutes after eight

on Thursday, June 10, 1919." This was allowing for the walk from her housea walk concerning which he had

afterward not the faintest recollection. He was in rather grotesque condition: two days of worry and

nervousness, of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating in the emotional crisis and Rosalind's

abrupt decisionthe strain of it had drugged the foreground of his mind into a merciful coma. As he fumbled

clumsily with the olives at the freelunch table, a man approached and spoke to him, and the olives dropped

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

Wilson had another; Amory had several more. They decided to sit down. At ten o'clock Wilson was displaced

by Carling, class of '15. Amory, his head spinning gorgeously, layer upon layer of soft satisfaction setting

"'S a mental was'e," he insisted with owllike wisdom. "Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los'

idealism, got be physcal anmal," he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, "got be Prussian 'bout

ev'thing, women 'specially. Use' be straight 'bout women college. Now don'givadam." He expressed his lack

of principle by sweeping a seltzer bottle with a broad gesture to noisy extinction on the floor, but this did not

interrupt his speech. "Seek pleasure where find it for tomorrow die. 'At's philos'phy for me now on."

Carling yawned, but Amory, waxing brilliant, continued: "Use' wonder 'bout thingspeople satisfied

compromise, fif'yfif'y att'tude on life. Now don' wonder, don' wonder" He became so emphatic in

impressing on Carling the fact that he didn't wonder that he lost the thread of his discourse and concluded by

announcing to the bar at large that he was a "physcal anmal." "What are you celebrating, Amory?"

Amory considered the question. He tried to look at himself in the mirror but even by squinting up one eye

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

With this assistance Amory managed to get his legs in motion enough to propel him across Fortysecond

Shanley's was very dim. He was conscious that he was talking in a loud voice, very succinctly and

convincingly, he thought, about a desire to crush people under his heel. He consumed three club sandwiches,

devouring each as though it were no larger than a chocolatedrop. Then Rosalind began popping into his

mind again, and he found his lips forming her name over and over. Next he was sleepy, and he had a hazy,

listless sense of people in dress suits, probably waiters, gathering around the table.... ...He was in a room and

He awoke laughing and his eyes lazily roamed his surroundings, evidently a bedroom and bath in a good

hotel. His head was whirring and picture after picture was forming and blurring and melting before his eyes,

but beyond the desire to laugh he had no entirely conscious reaction. He reached for the 'phone beside his

He lay for a moment and wondered idly whether they'd send up a bottle or just two of those little glass

containers. Then, with an effort, he struggled out of bed and ambled into the bathroom. When he emerged,

rubbing himself lazily with a towel, he found the bar boy with the drinks and had a sudden desire to kid him.

As the new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and warmed him, the isolated pictures began slowly to form a

cinema reel of the day before. Again he saw Rosalind curled weeping among the pillows, again he felt her

tears against his cheek. Her words began ringing in his ears: "Don't ever forget me, Amorydon't ever forget

"Hell!" he faltered aloud, and then he choked and collapsed on the bed in a shaken spasm of grief. After a

"Damned fool!" he exclaimed in disgust, and with a voluminous sigh rose and approached the bottle. After

another glass he gave way loosely to the luxury of tears. Purposely he called up into his mind little incidents

of the vanished spring, phrased to himself emotions that would make him react even more strongly to sorrow.

"We were so happy," he intoned dramatically, "so very happy." Then he gave way again and knelt beside the

"Oh ... my baby girl, all I had, all I wanted!... Oh, my girl, come back, come back! I need you ... need you ...

we're so pitiful ... just misery we brought each other.... She'll be shut away from me.... I can't see her; I can't

He rose to his feet and threw himself on the bed in an ecstasy of sentiment, and then lay exhausted while he

realized slowly that he had been very drunk the night before, and that his head was spinning again wildly. He

At noon he ran into a crowd in the Biltmore bar, and the riot began again. He had a vague recollection

afterward of discussing French poetry with a British officer who was introduced to him as "Captain Corn, of

his Majesty's Foot," and he remembered attempting to recite "Clair de Lune" at luncheon; then he slept in a

big, soft chair until almost five o'clock when another crowd found and woke him; there followed an alcoholic

dressing of several temperaments for the ordeal of dinner. They selected theatre tickets at Tyson's for a play

that had a fourdrink programmea play with two monotonous voices, with turbid, gloomy scenes, and

lighting effects that were hard to follow when his eyes behaved so amazingly. He imagined afterward that it

...Then the Cocoanut Grove, where Amory slept again on a little balcony outside. Out in Shanley's, Yonkers,

he became almost logical, and by a careful control of the number of highballs he drank, grew quite lucid and

garrulous. He found that the party consisted of five men, two of whom he knew slightly; he became righteous

about paying his share of the expense and insisted in a loud voice on arranging everything then and there to

Some one mentioned that a famous cabaret star was at the next table, so Amory rose and, approaching

gallantly, introduced himself ... this involved him in an argument, first with her escort and then with the

headwaiterAmory's attitude being a lofty and exaggerated courtesy ... he consented, after being confronted

with irrefutable logic, to being led back to his own table. "Decided to commit suicide," he announced

"Now. Tomorrow morning. Going to take a room at the Commodore, get into a hot bath and open a vein."

But Amory was not to be dissuaded, from argument at least. "Did you ever get that way?" he demanded

This provoked discussion. One man said that he got so depressed sometimes that he seriously considered it.

Another agreed that there was nothing to live for. "Captain Corn," who had somehow rejoined the party, said

that in his opinion it was when one's health was bad that one felt that way most. Amory's suggestion was that

they should each order a Bronx, mix broken glass in it, and drink it off. To his relief no one applauded the

idea, so having finished his highball, he balanced his chin in his hand and his elbow on the tablea most

delicate, scarcely noticeable sleeping position, he assured himselfand went into a deep stupor....

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

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

"Fella I was with's a damn fool," confided the blueeyed woman. "I hate him. I want to go home with you."

"Go home with him," he advised gravely. "He brought you." At this point the noisy man in the background

Amory regarded him coldly, while the girl clung to him closer. "You let go that girl!" cried the noisy man.

"I love you," she breathed and nestled close to him. She did have beautiful eyes.

"That's just Margaret Diamond. She's drunk and this fellow here brought her. Better let her go."

"Let him take care of her, then!" shouted Amory furiously. "I'm no W. Y. C. A. worker, am I?am I?"

The crowd around the table thickened. For an instant a brawl threatened, but a sleek waiter bent back

Margaret Diamond's fingers until she released her hold on Amory, whereupon she slapped the waiter

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

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

"Well, Mr. Blaine. We haven't seen you for several days." "No," said Amory. "I'm quitting."

"I'm sorry. I thought our relations had been quiteahpleasant. You seemed to be a hard workera little

"I just got tired of it," interrupted Amory rudely. "It didn't matter a damn to me whether Harebell's flour was

any better than any one else's. In fact, I never ate any of it. So I got tired of telling people about itoh, I know

"And I think I was rottenly underpaid. Thirtyfive dollars a weekless than a good carpenter."

"But it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I could write your darned stuff for you. Anyway,

as far as length of service goes, you've got stenographers here you've paid fifteen a week for five years."

"I'm not going to argue with you, sir," said Mr. Barlow rising. "Neither am I. I just wanted to tell you I'm

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

Four days after that he returned at last to the apartment. Tom was engaged on a book review for The New

Democracy on the staff of which he was employed. They regarded each other for a moment in silence.

"Oh, a lot of people. I got beaten up. Fact." He slowly replaced his shirt. "It was bound to come sooner or

"Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few stray pedestrians, I guess. It's the strangest

feeling. You ought to get beaten up just for the experience of it. You fall down after a while and everybody

"I spent a day chasing you all over town, Amory. But you always kept a little ahead of me. I'd say you've

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

Amory walked into his bedroom. The first thing that met his glance was a photograph of Rosalind that he had

intended to have framed, propped up against a mirror on his dresser. He looked at it unmoved. After the vivid

mental pictures of her that were his portion at present, the portrait was curiously unreal. He went back into

"No," answered Tom, puzzled. "Why should I have? Oh, yesthere may be one in Alec's room."

Eventually Amory found what he was looking for and, returning to his dresser, opened a drawer full of

letters, notes, part of a chain, two little handkerchiefs, and some snapshots. As he transferred them carefully

to the box his mind wandered to some place in a book where the hero, after preserving for a year a cake of his

lost love's soap, finally washed his hands with it. He laughed and began to hum "After you've gone" ... ceased

The string broke twice, and then he managed to secure it, dropped the package into the bottom of his trunk,

Amory crossed the street and had a highball; then he walked to Washington Square and found a top seat on

a bus. He disembarked at Fortythird Street and strolled to the Biltmore bar. "Hi, Amory!"

The advent of prohibition with the "thirstyfirst" put a sudden stop to the submerging of Amory's sorrows,

and when he awoke one morning to find that the old bartobar days were over, he had neither remorse for

the past three weeks nor regret that their repetition was impossible. He had taken the most violent, if the

weakest, method to shield himself from the stabs of memory, and while it was not a course he would have

prescribed for others, he found in the end that it had done its business: he was over the first flush of pain.

Don't misunderstand! Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken

the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him,

gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later loveaffairs, but of a

different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became

the mirror of a mood in him. Rosalind had drawn out what was more than passionate admiration; he had a

deep, undying affection for Rosalind. But there had been, near the end, so much dramatic tragedy,

culminating in the arabesque nightmare of his three weeks' spree, that he was emotionally worn out. The

people and surroundings that he remembered as being cool or delicately artificial, seemed to promise him a

refuge. He wrote a cynical story which featured his father's funeral and despatched it to a magazine, receiving

in return a check for sixty dollars and a request for more of the same tone. This tickled his vanity, but inspired

He read enormously. He was puzzled and depressed by "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"; intensely

interested by "Joan and Peter" and "The Undying Fire," and rather surprised by his discovery through a critic

named Mencken of several excellent American novels: "Vandover and the Brute," "The Damnation of Theron

Ware," and "Jennie Gerhardt." Mackenzie, Chesterton, Galsworthy, Bennett, had sunk in his appreciation

from sagacious, lifesaturated geniuses to merely diverting contemporaries. Shaw's aloof clarity and brilliant

consistency and the gloriously intoxicated efforts of H. G. Wells to fit the key of romantic symmetry into the

He wanted to see Monsignor Darcy, to whom he had written when he landed, but he had not heard from him;

besides he knew that a visit to Monsignor would entail the story of Rosalind, and the thought of repeating it

In his search for cool people he remembered Mrs. Lawrence, a very intelligent, very dignified lady, a convert

He called her on the 'phone one day. Yes, she remembered him perfectly; no, Monsignor wasn't in town, was

in Boston she thought; he'd promised to come to dinner when he returned. Couldn't Amory take luncheon

"I thought I'd better catch up, Mrs. Lawrence," he said rather ambiguously when he arrived.

"Monsignor was here just last week," said Mrs. Lawrence regretfully. "He was very anxious to see you, but

"He went to Boston when the Irish President arrived and he was greatly distressed because the receiving

committee, when they rode in an automobile, would put their arms around the President."

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

"That's from another, more disastrous battle," he answered, smiling in spite of himself. "But the armylet me

seewell, I discovered that physical courage depends to a great extent on the physical shape a man is in. I

"Well, the idea that men can stand anything if they get used to it, and the fact that I got a high mark in the

Mrs. Lawrence laughed. Amory was finding it a great relief to be in this cool house on Riverside Drive, away

from more condensed New York and the sense of people expelling great quantities of breath into a little

space. Mrs. Lawrence reminded him vaguely of Beatrice, not in temperament, but in her perfect grace and

dignity. The house, its furnishings, the manner in which dinner was served, were in immense contrast to what

he had met in the great places on Long Island, where the servants were so obtrusive that they had positively

to be bumped out of the way, or even in the houses of more conservative "Union Club" families. He

wondered if this air of symmetrical restraint, this grace, which he felt was continental, was distilled through

Mrs. Lawrence's New England ancestry or acquired in long residence in Italy and Spain.

Two glasses of sauterne at luncheon loosened his tongue, and he talked, with what he felt was something of

his old charm, of religion and literature and the menacing phenomena of the social order. Mrs. Lawrence was

ostensibly pleased with him, and her interest was especially in his mind; he wanted people to like his mind

"Monsignor Darcy still thinks that you're his reincarnation, that your faith will eventually clarify."

"Perhaps," he assented. "I'm rather pagan at present. It's just that religion doesn't seem to have the slightest

When he left her house he walked down Riverside Drive with a feeling of satisfaction. It was amusing to

discuss again such subjects as this young poet, Stephen Vincent Benit, or the Irish Republic. Between the

rancid accusations of Edward Carson and Justice Cohalan he had completely tired of the Irish question; yet

there had been a time when his own Celtic traits were pillars of his personal philosophy.

There seemed suddenly to be much left in life, if only this revival of old interests did not mean that he was

"I'm tres old and tres bored, Tom," said Amory one day, stretching himself at ease in the comfortable

"You used to be entertaining before you started to write," he continued. "Now you save any idea that you

Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normality. They had decided that with economy they could still

afford the apartment, which Tom, with the domesticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond of. The old English

hunting prints on the wall were Tom's, and the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in college,

and the great profusion of orphaned candlesticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit

more than a minute without acute spinal disordersTom claimed that this was because one was sitting in the

lap of Montespan's wraithat any rate, it was Tom's furniture that decided them to stay. They went out very

little: to an occasional play, or to dinner at the Ritz or the Princeton Club. With prohibition the great

rendezvous had received their death wounds; no longer could one wander to the Biltmore bar at twelve or

five and find congenial spirits, and both Tom and Amory had outgrown the passion for dancing with

midWestern or New Jersey debbies at the ClubdeVingt (surnamed the "Club de Gink") or the Plaza Rose

Roombesides even that required several cocktails "to come down to the intellectual level of the women

Amory had lately received several alarming letters from Mr. Bartonthe Lake Geneva house was too large to

be easily rented; the best rent obtainable at present would serve this year to little more than pay for the taxes

and necessary improvements; in fact, the lawyer suggested that the whole property was simply a white

elephant on Amory's hands. Nevertheless, even though it might not yield a cent for the next three years,

Amory decided with a vague sentimentality that for the present, at any rate, he would not sell the house.

This particular day on which he announced his ennui to Tom had been quite typical. He had risen at noon,

lunched with Mrs. Lawrence, and then ridden abstractedly homeward atop one of his beloved buses.

"Why shouldn't you be bored," yawned Tom. "Isn't that the conventional frame of mind for the young man of

"Well," Amory considered, "I'm not sure that the war itself had any great effect on either you or mebut it

certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation."

"Yes it did," insisted Amory. "I'm not sure it didn't kill it out of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it

used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leaderand now even a

Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn't be a real oldfashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge

and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an

"I don't agree with you," Tom interrupted. "There never were men placed in such egotistic positions sinceoh,

"You're mistaking this period when every nut is an individualist for a period of individualism. Wilson has

only been powerful when he has represented; he's had to compromise over and over again. Just as soon as

Trotsky and Lenin take a definite, consistent stand they'll become merely twominute figures like Kerensky.

Even Foch hasn't half the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War used to be the most individualistic pursuit

of man, and yet the popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor responsibility: Guynemer and

Sergeant York. How could a schoolboy make a hero of Pershing? A big man has no time really to do

"Yesin historynot in life. Carlyle would have difficulty getting material for a new chapter on 'The Hero as a

"People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or

politician or soldier or writer or philosophera Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the

crosscurrents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest

"Absolutely. Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the

country, read by the men who do things and all that. What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as

interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned

you to deal with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more

money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue. You, Tom d'Invilliers, a blighted Shelley, changing,

shifting, clever, unscrupulous, represent the critical consciousness of the raceOh, don't protest, I know the

stuff. I used to write book reviews in college; I considered it rare sport to refer to the latest honest,

conscientious effort to propound a theory or a remedy as a 'welcome addition to our light summer reading.'

"We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their

Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered,

illogical, illconsidered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party

with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that

is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of

modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices,

and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence:

more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the

"And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have

quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people's heads; I might cause

a poor, inoffensive capitalist to have a vulgar liaison with a bomb, or get some innocent little Bolshevik

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

"How'll I fit in?" he demanded. "What am I for? To propagate the race? According to the American novels

we are led to believe that the 'healthy American boy' from nineteen to twentyfive is an entirely sexless

animal. As a matter of fact, the healthier he is the less that's true. The only alternative to letting it get you is

some violent interest. Well, the war is over; I believe too much in the responsibilities of authorship to write

just now; and business, well, business speaks for itself. It has no connection with anything in the world that

I've ever been interested in, except a slim, utilitarian connection with economics. What I'd see of it, lost in a

clerkship, for the next and best ten years of my life would have the intellectual content of an industrial

"Trouble is I get distracted when I start to write storiesget afraid I'm doing it instead of livingget thinking

maybe life is waiting for me in the Japanese gardens at the Ritz or at Atlantic City or on the lower East Side.

"Anyway," he continued, "I haven't the vital urge. I wanted to be a regular human being but the girl couldn't

"God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for

you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody. If I thought there'd be another I'd lose my

remaining faith in human nature. Maybe I'll playbut Rosalind was the only girl in the wide world that could

"Well," yawned Tom, "I've played confidant a good hour by the clock. Still, I'm glad to see you're beginning

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

There were days when Amory listened. These were when Tom, wreathed in smoke, indulged in the slaughter

"Fifty thousand dollars a year," he would cry. "My God! Look at them, look at themEdna Ferber, Gouverneur

Morris, Fanny Hurst, Mary Roberts Rinehartnot producing among 'em one story or novel that will last ten

years. This man CobbI don't tink he's either clever or amusingand what's more, I don't think very many

people do, except the editors. He's just groggy with advertising. Andoh Harold Bell Wright oh Zane Grey"

"No, they don't even try. Some of them can write, but they won't sit down and do one honest novel. Most of

them can't write, I'll admit. I believe Rupert Hughes tries to give a real, comprehensive picture of American

life, but his style and perspective are barbarous. Ernest Poole and Dorothy Canfield try but they're hindered

by their absolute lack of any sense of humor; but at least they crowd their work instead of spreading it thin.

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it."

"Don't slow me up! Now there's a few of 'em that seem to have some cultural background, some intelligence

and a good deal of literary felicity but they just simply won't write honestly; they'd all claim there was no

public for good stuff. Then why the devil is it that Wells, Conrad, Galsworthy, Shaw, Bennett, and the rest

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

"I'm writing a satire on 'em now, calling it 'Boston Bards and Hearst Reviewers.'"

"That's very modern. Let's hear 'em, if they're funny." Tom produced a folded paper from his pocket and read

"You win the iron pansy. I'll buy you a meal on the arrogance of the last two lines."

Amory did not entirely agree with Tom's sweeping damnation of American novelists and poets. He enjoyed

both Vachel Lindsay and Booth Tarkington, and admired the conscientious, if slender, artistry of Edgar Lee

"What I hate is this idiotic drivel about 'I am GodI am manI ride the windsI look through the smokeI am the

"And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody

wants to read about it, unless it's crooked business. If it was an entertaining subject they'd buy the life of

James J. Hill and not one of these long office tragedies that harp along on the significance of smoke" "And

gloom," said Tom. That's another favorite, though I'll admit the Russians have the monopoly. Our specialty is

stories about little girls who break their spines and get adopted by grouchy old men because they smile so

much. You'd think we were a race of cheerful cripples and that the common end of the Russian peasant was

"Six o'clock," said Amory, glancing at his wristwatch. "I'll buy you a grea' big dinner on the strength of the

July sweltered out with a last hot week, and Amory in another surge of unrest realized that it was just five

months since he and Rosalind had met. Yet it was already hard for him to visualize the heartwhole boy who

had stepped off the transport, passionately desiring the adventure of life. One night while the heat,

overpowering and enervating, poured into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague

The February streets, windwashed by night, blow full of strange halfintermittent damps, bearing on wasted

walks in shining sight wet snow plashed into gleams under the lamps, like golden oil from some divine

machine, in an hour of thaw and stars. Strange dampsfull of the eyes of many men, crowded with life borne

in upon a lull.... Oh, I was young, for I could turn again to you, most finite and most beautiful, and taste the

...There was a tanging in the midnight airsilence was dead and sound not yet awokenLife cracked like ice!one

brilliant note and there, radiant and pale, you stood ... and spring had broken. (The icicles were short upon the

Our thoughts were frosty mist along the eaves; our two ghosts kissed, high on the long, mazed wireseerie

halflaughter echoes here and leaves only a fatuous sigh for young desires; regret has followed after things

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

Your last letter was quite enough to make me worry about you. It was not a bit like yourself. Reading

between the lines I should imagine that your engagement to this girl is making you rather unhappy, and I see

you have lost all the feeling of romance that you had before the war. You make a great mistake if you think

you can be romantic without religion. Sometimes I think that with both of us the secret of success, when we

find it, is the mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our personalities, and when it ebbs

out our personalities shrink; I should call your last two letters rather shrivelled. Beware of losing yourself in

His Eminence Cardinal O'Neill and the Bishop of Boston are staying with me at present, so it is hard for me

to get a moment to write, but I wish you would come up here later if only for a weekend. I go to

What I shall do in the future is hanging in the balance. Absolutely between ourselves I should not be

surprised to see the red hat of a cardinal descend upon my unworthy head within the next eight months. In

any event, I should like to have a house in New York or Washington where you could drop in for weekends.

Amory, I'm very glad we're both alive; this war could easily have been the end of a brilliant family. But in

regard to matrimony, you are now at the most dangerous period of your life. You might marry in haste and

repent at leisure, but I think you won't. From what you write me about the present calamitous state of your

finances, what you want is naturally impossible. However, if I judge you by the means I usually choose, I

should say that there will be something of an emotional crisis within the next year. Do write me. I feel

Within a week after the receipt of this letter their little household fell precipitously to pieces. The immediate

cause was the serious and probably chronic illness of Tom's mother. So they stored the furniture, gave

instructions to sublet and shook hands gloomily in the Pennsylvania Station. Amory and Tom seemed always

Feeling very much alone, Amory yielded to an impulse and set off southward, intending to join Monsignor in

Washington. They missed connections by two hours, and, deciding to spend a few days with an ancient,

remembered uncle, Amory journeyed up through the luxuriant fields of Maryland into Ramilly County. But

instead of two days his stay lasted from midAugust nearly through September, for in Maryland he met

FOR YEARS AFTERWARD when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing

around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope

and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore;

and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close

to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded

With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride

high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other. But Eleanordid Amory dream her?

Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the infinite

sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say:

"And Amory will have no other adventure like me." Nor will she sigh, any more than he would sigh. Eleanor

"The fading things we only know We'll have forgotten... Put away... Desires that melted with the snow, And

dreams begotten This today: The sudden dawns we laughed to greet, That all could see, that none could

Dear ... not one tear will rise for this... A little while hence No regret Will stir for a remembered kiss Not

even silence, When we've met, Will give old ghosts a waste to roam, Or stir the surface of the sea... If gray

They quarrelled dangerously because Amory maintained that sea and see couldn't possibly be used as a

rhyme. And then Eleanor had part of another verse that she couldn't find a beginning for:

Eleanor hated Maryland passionately. She belonged to the oldest of the old families of Ramilly County and

lived in a big, gloomy house with her grandfather. She had been born and brought up in France.... I see I am

starting wrong. Let me begin again. Amory was bored, as he usually was in the country. He used to go for far

walks by himselfand wander along reciting "Ulalume" to the cornfields, and congratulating Poe for drinking

himself to death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency. One afternoon he had strolled for several miles

along a road that was new to him, and then through a wood on bad advice from a colored woman ... losing

himself entirely. A passing storm decided to break out, and to his great impatience the sky grew black as

pitch and the rain began to splatter down through the trees, become suddenly furtive and ghostly. Thunder

rolled with menacing crashes up the valley and scattered through the woods in intermittent batteries. He

stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally, through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a

rift in the trees where the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed to the edge of the woods and

then hesitated whether or not to cross the fields and try to reach the shelter of the little house marked by a

light far down the valley. It was only half past five, but he could see scarcely ten steps before him, except

Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a low, husky voice, a girl's voice, and whoever

was singing was very close to him. A year before he might have laughed, or trembled; but in his restless

"Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langueur Monotone."

The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a quaver. The girl was evidently in the field and the

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

"Tout suffocant Et bljme quand Sonne l'heure Je me souviens Des jours anciens Et je pleure...."

"Who the devil is there in Ramilly County," muttered Amory aloud, "who would deliver Verlaine in an

"Somebody's there!" cried the voice unalarmed. "Who are you?Manfred, St. Christopher, or Queen

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

"I know who you areyou're the blond boy that likes 'Ulalume'I recognize your voice."

"How do I get up?" he cried from the foot of the haystack, whither he had arrived, dripping wet. A head

appeared over the edgeit was so dark that Amory could just make out a patch of damp hair and two eyes that

"Run back!" came the voice, "and jump and I'll catch your handno, not thereon the other side."

He followed directions and as he sprawled up the side, kneedeep in hay, a small, white hand reached out,

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

"And you're holding my hand, which is dangerous without seeing my face." He dropped it quickly.

As if in answer to his prayers came a flash of lightning and he looked eagerly at her who stood beside him on

the soggy haystack, ten feet above the ground. But she had covered her face and he saw nothing but a slender

figure, dark, damp, bobbed hair, and the small white hands with the thumbs that bent back like his. "Sit

down," she suggested politely, as the dark closed in on them. "If you'll sit opposite me in this hollow you can

have half of the raincoat, which I was using as a waterproof tent until you so rudely interrupted me."

"Don Juan always manages that," she said, laughing, "but I shan't call you that any more, because you've got

reddish hair. Instead you can recite 'Ulalume' and I'll be Psyche, your soul." Amory flushed, happily invisible

under the curtain of wind and rain. They were sitting opposite each other in a slight hollow in the hay with

the raincoat spread over most of them, and the rain doing for the rest. Amory was trying desperately to see

Psyche, but the lightning refused to flash again, and he waited impatiently. Good Lord! supposing she wasn't

beautifulsupposing she was forty and pedanticheavens! Suppose, only suppose, she was mad. But he knew

the last was unworthy. Here had Providence sent a girl to amuse him just as it sent Benvenuto Cellini men to

murder, and he was wondering if she was mad, just because she exactly filled his mood.

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

As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory could be "on a subject" and stop talking with the

definite thought of it in their heads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that their minds had followed

the same channels and led them each to a parallel idea, an idea that others would have found absolutely

"Tell me," he demanded, leaning forward eagerly, "how do you know about 'Ulalume'how did you know the

color of my hair? What's your name? What were you doing here? Tell me all at once!"

Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of overreaching light and he saw Eleanor, and looked for the

first time into those eyes of hers. Oh, she was magnificentpale skin, the color of marble in starlight, slender

brows, and eyes that glittered green as emeralds in the blinding glare. She was a witch, of perhaps nineteen,

he judged, alert and dreamy and with the telltale white line over her upper lip that was a weakness and a

delight. He sank back with a gasp against the wall of hay. "Now you've seen me," she said calmly, "and I

suppose you're about to say that my green eyes are burning into your brain." "What color is your hair?" he

"Yes, it's bobbed. I don't know what color it is," she answered, musing, "so many men have asked me. It's

medium, I suppose No one ever looks long at my hair. I've got beautiful eyes, though, haven't I. I don't care

"I might have guessed it. You look like Eleanoryou have that Eleanor look. You know what I mean."

"It's going down my neck, fellow lunatic," she offered finally. "Answer my questions."

"Wellname of Savage, Eleanor; live in big old house mile down road; nearest living relation to be notified,

grandfatherRamilly Savage; height, five feet four inches; number on watchcase, 3077 W; nose, delicate

"Oh, you're one of those men," she answered haughtily, "must lug old self into conversation. Well, my boy, I

was behind a hedge sunning myself one day last week, and along comes a man saying in a pleasant, conceited

"'And now when the night was senescent' (says he) 'And the star dials pointed to morn At the end of the path

So I poked my eyes up over the hedge, but you had started to run, for some unknown reason, and so I saw but

the back of your beautiful head. 'Oh!' says I, 'there's a man for whom many of us might sigh,' and I continued

"All right," Amory interrupted. "Now go back to yourself." "Well, I will. I'm one of those people who go

through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such

nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write

The storm was dying down softly and only the wind kept up its ghostly surge and made the stack lean and

gravely settle from side to side. Amory was in a trance. He felt that every moment was precious. He had

never met a girl like this beforeshe would never seem quite the same again. He didn't at all feel like a

character in a play, the appropriate feeling in an unconventional situationinstead, he had a sense of coming

"I have just made a great decision," said Eleanor after another pause, "and that is why I'm here, to answer

another of your questions. I have just decided that I don't believe in immortality."

"Frightfully so," she answered, "but depressing with a stale, sickly depression, nevertheless. I came out here

to get wetlike a wet hen; wet hens always have great clarity of mind," she concluded.

"WellI'm not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and rubber boots and came out. You see I was always

afraid, before, to say I didn't believe in Godbecause the lightning might strike mebut here I am and it hasn't,

of course, but the main point is that this time I wasn't any more afraid of it than I had been when I was a

Christian Scientist, like I was last year. So now I know I'm a materialist and I was fraternizing with the hay

"Yourself!" she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands and laughed. "Seesee! Consciencekill it like

"But I have to have a soul," he objected. "I can't be rationaland I won't be molecular."

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

"I thought so, Juan, I feared soyou're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist."

"I'm not sentimentalI'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks

things will lastthe romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't." (This was an ancient

"Epigrams. I'm going home," she said sadly. "Let's get off the haystack and walk to the crossroads."

They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help her down and motioning him away

arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mud where she sat for an instant, laughing at herself. Then she jumped

to her feet and slipped her hand into his, and they tiptoed across the fields, jumping and swinging from dry

spot to dry spot. A transcendent delight seemed to sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen and

the storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow

cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders

of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with hershe was a feast

and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green

eyes. His paganism soared that night and when she faded out like a gray ghost down the road, a deep singing

came out of the fields and filled his way homeward. All night the summer moths flitted in and out of Amory's

window; all night large looming sounds swayed in mystic revery through the silver grainand he lay awake in

"Easter!" She turned up her nose. "Huh! Spring in corsets!" "Easter would bore spring, wouldn't she? Easter

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

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

"Summer has no day," she said. "We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the

name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm

balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth.... It has no day." "Fourth of July,"

"Oh, I suppose heaven would, if there was one," she said finally, "a sort of pagan heavenyou ought to be a

To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he knew Eleanor. What he said, his attitude

toward life, toward her, toward himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman's literary moods. Often she

sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing with her short hair, her voice husky as she ran up and down the scale

from Grantchester to Waikiki. There was something most passionate in Eleanor's reading aloud. They seemed

nearer, not only mentally, but physically, when they read, than when she was in his arms, and this was often,

for they fell half into love almost from the first. Yet was Amory capable of love now? He could, as always,

run through the emotions in a half hour, but even while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew that

neither of them could care as he had cared once beforeI suppose that was why they turned to Brooke, and

Swinburne, and Shelley. Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative;

they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep

love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream. One poem they read over and over; Swinburne's

"Triumph of Time," and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw the

fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out

of the night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a fleecyheaded drum,

They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told him her history. The Ramillys were two: old

Mr. Ramilly and his granddaughter, Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless mother whom Amory

imagined to have been very like his own, on whose death she had come to America, to live in Maryland. She

had gone to Baltimore first to stay with a bachelor uncle, and there she insisted on being a dibutante at the

age of seventeen. She had a wild winter and arrived in the country in March, having quarrelled frantically

with all her Baltimore relatives, and shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowd had come out, who

drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuously condescending and patronizing toward older people,

and Eleanor with an esprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many innocents still redolent of St.

Timothy's and Farmington, into paths of Bohemian naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle, a

forgetful cavalier of a more hypocritical era, there was a scene, from which Eleanor emerged, subdued but

rebellious and indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather who hovered in the country on the near side of

senility. That's as far as her story went; she told him the rest herself, but that was later. Often they swam and

as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut his mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soapbubble lands

where the sun splattered through winddrunk trees. How could any one possibly think or worry, or do

anything except splash and dive and loll there on the edge of time while the flower months failed. Let the

days move oversadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more, before he went on to

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching

ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenestwo years of

sweat and blood, that sudden absurd instinct for paternity that Rosalind had stirred; the halfsensual,

halfneurotic quality of this autumn with Eleanor. He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever

spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrapbook of his life. It was all like a banquet

where he sat for this halfhour of his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses.

Dimly he promised himself a time where all should be welded together. For months it seemed that he had

alternated between being borne along a stream of love or fascination, or left in an eddy, and in the eddies he

had not desired to think, rather to be picked up on a wave's top and swept along again.

"The despairing, dying autumn and our lovehow well they harmonize!" said Eleanor sadly one day as they

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it

seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty in curious elfin

love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vinehung pagoda, where

there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical. "Light a match," she whispered. "I want to see you."

The night and the scarred trees were like scenery in a play, and to be there with Eleanor, shadowy and unreal,

seemed somehow oddly familiar. Amory thought how it was only the past that ever seemed strange and

"We're just voices now," murmured Eleanor, "little lonesome voices. Light another."

"You are mineyou know you're mine!" he cried wildly ... the moonlight twisted in through the vines and

listened ... the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.

"No wind is stirring in the grass; not one wind stirs ... the water in the hidden pools, as glass, fronts the full

moon and so inters the golden token in its icy mass," chanted Eleanor to the trees that skeletoned the body of

the night. "Isn't it ghostly here? If you can hold your horse's feet up, let's cut through the woods and find the

"It's after one, and you'll get the devil," he objected, "and I don't know enough about horses to put one away

"Shut up, you old fool," she whispered irrelevantly, and, leaning over, she patted him lazily with her

ridingcrop. "You can leave your old plug in our stable and I'll send him over tomorrow." "But my uncle

"Don't be a spoilsportremember, you have a tendency toward wavering that prevents you from being the

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

"Oh, do!or rather, don't! Why are all the exciting things so uncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and

skiing in Canada? By the way, we're going to ride up Harper's Hill. I think that comes in our programme

"You little devil," Amory growled. "You're going to make me stay up all night and sleep in the train like an

"Hush! some one's coming along the roadlet's go! Whooeeoop!" And with a shout that probably gave the

belated traveller a series of shivers, she turned her horse into the woods and Amory followed slowly, as he

had followed her all day for three weeks. The summer was over, but he had spent the days in watching

Eleanor, a graceful, facile Manfred, build herself intellectual and imaginative pyramids while she revelled in

the artificialities of the temperamental teens and they wrote poetry at the dinnertable.

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men

"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said ... yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was

dead... Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair: "Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and

pause before his sonnet there" ... So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no

So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the "Dark Lady of the Sonnets," and how

little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired,

to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live ... and now we have no real

interest in her.... The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would

be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it after twenty years....

This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor. He was leaving in the morning and they had agreed to take a

long farewell trot by the cold moonlight. She wanted to talk, she saidperhaps the last time in her life that she

could be rational (she meant pose with comfort). So they had turned into the woods and rode for half an hour

with scarcely a word, except when she whispered "Damn!" at a bothersome branchwhispered it as no other

girl was ever able to whisper it. Then they started up Harper's Hill, walking their tired horses.

"Good Lord! It's quiet here!" whispered Eleanor; "much more lonesome than the woods."

"I hate woods," Amory said, shuddering. "Any kind of foliage or underbrush at night. Out here it's so broad

It was quiet that nightthe straight road they followed up to the edge of the cliff knew few footsteps at any

time. Only an occasional negro cabin, silvergray in the rockribbed moonlight, broke the long line of bare

ground; behind lay the black edge of the woods like a dark frosting on white cake, and ahead the sharp, high

horizon. It was much colderso cold that it settled on them and drove all the warm nights from their minds.

hoofs'tumptumptumpatump.' Have you ever been feverish and had all noises divide into

'tumptumptump' until you could swear eternity was divisible into so many tumps? That's the way I feelold

horses go tumptump.... I guess that's the only thing that separates horses and clocks from us. Human beings

"No, I'm thinking about myselfmy black old inside self, the real one, with the fundamental honesty that

They were riding up close by the cliff and Amory gazed over. Where the fall met the ground a hundred feet

below, a black stream made a sharp line, broken by tiny glints in the swift water.

"Rotten, rotten old world," broke out Eleanor suddenly, "and the wretchedest thing of all is meoh, why am I a

girl? Why am I not a stupid? Look at you; you're stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope

about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being

involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justifiedand here am I with the brains to do

everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well

and good, but now what's in store for meI have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I'm too bright for

most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their

attention. Every year that I don't marry I've got less chance for a firstclass man. At the best I can have my

choice from one or two cities and, of course, I have to marry into a dinnercoat.

"Listen," she leaned close again, "I like clever men and goodlooking men, and, of course, no one cares more

for personality than I do. Oh, just one person in fifty has any glimmer of what sex is. I'm hipped on Freud and

all that, but it's rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninetynine per cent passion and one little

"Of course, you're right," Amory agreed. "It's a rather unpleasant overpowering force that's part of the

machinery under everything. It's like an actor that lets you see his mechanics! Wait a minute till I think this

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

feet to the left. "You see every one's got to have some cloak to throw around it. The mediocre intellects,

Plato's second class, use the remnants of romantic chivalry diluted with Victorian sentimentand we who

consider ourselves the intellectuals cover it up by pretending that it's another side of us, has nothing to do

with our shining brains; we pretend that the fact that we realize it is really absolving us from being a prey to

it. But the truth is that sex is right in the middle of our purest abstractions, so close that it obscures vision.... I

can kiss you now and will...." He leaned toward her in his saddle, but she drew away.

"You're more stupid then," he declared rather impatiently. "Intellect is no protection from sex any more than

"That's your panacea, isn't it?" she cried. "Oh, you're just an old hypocrite, too. Thousands of scowling priests

keeping the degenerate Italians and illiterate Irish repentant with gabblegabble about the sixth and ninth

commandments. It's just all cloaks, sentiment and spiritual rouge and panaceas. I'll tell you there is no God,

not even a definite abstract goodness; so it's all got to be worked out for the individual by the individual here

in high white foreheads like mine, and you're too much the prig to admit it." She let go her reins and shook

"Talking about God again after the manner of atheists," Amory said sharply. His materialism, always a thin

cloak, was torn to shreds by Eleanor's blasphemy.... She knew it and it angered him that she knew it.

"And like most intellectuals who don't find faith convenient," he continued coldly, "like Napoleon and Oscar

Wilde and the rest of your type, you'll yell loudly for a priest on your deathbed." Eleanor drew her horse up

sharply and he reined in beside her. "Will I?" she said in a queer voice that scared him. "Will I? Watch! I'm

going over the cliff!" And before he could interfere she had turned and was riding breakneck for the end of

He wheeled and started after her, his body like ice, his nerves in a vast clangor. There was no chance of

stopping her. The moon was under a cloud and her horse would step blindly over. Then some ten feet from

the edge of the cliff she gave a sudden shriek and flung herself sidewaysplunged from her horse and, rolling

over twice, landed in a pile of brush five feet from the edge. The horse went over with a frantic whinny. In a

"Oh!" she wailed. "I thought I was going over. I didn't know" He helped her gently to her feet and boosted

her onto his saddle. So they started homeward; Amory walking and she bent forward on the pommel, sobbing

"I've got a crazy streak," she faltered, "twice before I've done things like that. When I was eleven mother

All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her

door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to

meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as

Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about

the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of

wind and the silences between ... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward and let

ATLANTIC CITY. Amory paced the board walk at day's end, lulled by the everlasting surge of changing

waves, smelling the halfmournful odor of the salt breeze. The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories

deeper than the faithless land. It seemed still to whisper of Norse galleys ploughing the water world under

ravenfigured flags, of the British dreadnoughts, gray bulwarks of civilization steaming up through the fog of

Amory looked down into the street below. A low racing car had drawn to a stop and a familiar cheerful face

Amory called a greeting and descending a flight of wooden steps approached the car. He and Alec had been

meeting intermittently, but the barrier of Rosalind lay always between them. He was sorry for this; he hated

"Amory," said Alec exuberantly, "if you'll jump in we'll take you to some secluded nook and give you a wee

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

"I was counting the waves," replied Amory gravely. "I'm going in for statistics."

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

"What you doing down here these cold days, Amory?" he demanded, as he produced a quart of Bourbon from

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

"Do I? When we slept in the pavilions up in Asbury Park" "Lord, Alec! It's hard to think that Jesse and Dick

"Don't talk about it. These dreary fall days depress me enough." Jill seemed to agree.

"Doug here is sorta gloomy anyways," she commented. "Tell him to drink deepit's good and scarce these

"What I really want to ask you, Amory, is where you are" "Why, New York, I suppose"

"I mean tonight, because if you haven't got a room yet you'd better help me out."

"You see, Tully and I have two rooms with bath between at the Ranier, and he's got to go back to New York.

I don't want to have to move. Question is, will you occupy one of the rooms?" Amory was willing, if he could

"You'll find the key in the office; the rooms are in my name." Declining further locomotion or further

stimulation, Amory left the car and sauntered back along the board walk to the hotel. He was in an eddy

again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate. For the first time in his life he

rather longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations.

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that

riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then,

deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only

with the great listlessness of his disillusion. "To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him." This

sentence was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he felt this was to be one. His mind had already

started to play variations on the subject. Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crushthese

alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youthbitter

In his room he undressed and wrapping himself in blankets to keep out the chill October air drowsed in an

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

"Rosalind! Rosalind!" He poured the words softly into the halfdarkness until she seemed to permeate the

room; the wet salt breeze filled his hair with moisture, the rim of a moon seared the sky and made the curtains

dim and ghostly. He fell asleep. When he awoke it was very late and quiet. The blanket had slipped partly off

Then his ears caught a louder sound from somewhere along the corridor outside. It was a mumbling of men's

voices and a repeated muffled rapping. Amory threw off the blankets and moved close to the bathroom door.

Suddenly a steady, insistent knocking began at Amory's hall door and simultaneously out of the bathroom

came Alec, followed by the vermilionlipped girl. They were both clad in pajamas.

"You don't understand. They can get me under the Mann Act." The girl followed him slowly, a rather

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

"No chance. I registered under my own name; besides, they'd trail the auto license number."

The girl had stolen to the bed and tumbled upon it; lay there listening wretchedly to the knocking which had

grown gradually to a pounding. Then came a man's voice, angry and imperative: "Open up or we'll break the

In the silence when this voice ceased Amory realized that there were other things in the room besides people

... over and around the figure crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as

stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over the three of them ... and over by the window

among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar....

Simultaneously two great cases presented themselves side by side to Amory; all that took place in his mind,

The first fact that flashed radiantly on his comprehension was the great impersonality of sacrificehe perceived

that what we call love and hate, reward and punishment, had no more to do with it than the date of the month.

He quickly recapitulated the story of a sacrifice he had heard of in college: a man had cheated in an

examination; his roommate in a gust of sentiment had taken the entire blamedue to the shame of it the

innocent one's entire future seemed shrouded in regret and failure, capped by the ingratitude of the real

culprit. He had finally taken his own lifeyears afterward the facts had come out. At the time the story had

both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the truth; that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It

was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of powerto certain people at certain times an

essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its

very momentum might drag him down to ruinthe passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might

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

...All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while ulterior to him and speculating upon him were

those two breathless, listening forces: the gossamer aura that hung over and about the girl and that familiar

thing by the window. Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally

Thatthought Amorywould be somehow the way God would talk to me. Amory felt a sudden surge of joy

and then like a face in a motionpicture the aura over the bed faded out; the dynamic shadow by the window,

that was as near as he could name it, remained for the fraction of a moment and then the breeze seemed to lift

it swiftly out of the room. He clinched his hands in quick ecstatic excitement ... the ten seconds were up....

Alec looked at him dumblyhis face a tableau of anguish. "You have a family," continued Amory slowly.

"You have a family and it's important that you should get out of this. Do you hear me?" He repeated clearly

what he had said. "Do you hear me?" "I hear you." The voice was curiously strained, the eyes never for a

"Alec, you're going to lie down here. If any one comes in you act drunk. You do what I sayif you don't I'll

probably kill you." There was another moment while they stared at each other. Then Amory went briskly to

the bureau and, taking his pocketbook, beckoned peremptorily to the girl. He heard one word from Alec that

sounded like "penitentiary," then he and Jill were in the bathroom with the door bolted behind them.

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

"I got you, Mr. O'May," said Olson, nodding. The other two took a curious glance at their quarry and then

"Didn't you ever hear of the Mann Act? Coming down here with her," he indicated the girl with his thumb,

"with a New York license on your carto a hotel like this." He shook his head implying that he had struggled

"Get dressed, quickand tell your friend not to make such a racket." Jill was sobbing noisily on the bed, but at

these words she subsided sulkily and, gathering up her clothes, retired to the bathroom. As Amory slipped

into Alec's B. V. D.'s he found that his attitude toward the situation was agreeably humorous. The aggrieved

virtue of the burly man made him want to laugh. "Anybody else here?" demanded Olson, trying to look keen

"Fellow who had the rooms," said Amory carelessly. "He's drunk as an owl, though. Been in there asleep

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

"Now then," began Olson, producing a notebook, "I want your real namesno damn John Smith or Mary

"Wait a minute," said Amory quietly. "Just drop that bigbully stuff. We merely got caught, that's all."

"Say," cried Olson indignantly, "just ease up on the nursery rhymes. What's your name? Sarah Murphy?

Minnie Jackson?" "Oh, my God!" cried the girl cupping her tearstained face in her hands. "I don't want my

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

"By rights the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police and you'd go to penitentiary, you would, for

bringin' a girl from one State to 'nother f'r immoral purp'ses"he paused to let the majesty of his words sink in.

A great lightness surrounded Amory. He realized that he was safe and only then did he appreciate the full

"However," continued Olson, "there's a protective association among the hotels. There's been too much of

this stuff, and we got a 'rangement with the newspapers so that you get a little free publicity. Not the name of

the hotel, but just a line sayin' that you had a little trouble in 'lantic City. See?"

"Come on," said Amory briskly. "Let's get out of here. We don't need a valedictory."

Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at Alec's still form. Then he extinguished the

lights and motioned them to follow him. As they walked into the elevator Amory considered a piece of

Olson's hat came off slowly. There was a rather embarrassing two minutes under the lights of the lobby while

the night clerk and a few belated guests stared at them curiously; the loudly dressed girl with bent head, the

handsome young man with his chin several points aloft; the inference was quite obvious. Then the chill

outdoorswhere the salt air was fresher and keener still with the first hints of morning.

"You can get one of those taxis and beat it," said Olson, pointing to the blurred outline of two machines

"Goodby," said Olson. He reached in his pocket suggestively, but Amory snorted, and, taking the girl's arm,

turned away. "Where did you tell the driver to go?" she asked as they whirled along the dim street.

"It does very well," agreed Amory critically, and then as an afterthought: "It's almost breakfasttimedo

"Food" she said with a cheerful laugh. "Food is what queered the party. We ordered a big supper to be sent up

to the room about two o'clock. Alec didn't give the waiter a tip, so I guess the little bastard snitched."

Jill's low spirits seemed to have gone faster than the scattering night. "Let me tell you," she said emphatically,

"when you want to stage that sorta party stay away from liquor, and when you want to get tight stay away

He tapped suddenly at the glass and they drew up at the door of an allnight restaurant.

"Is Alec a great friend of yours?" asked Jill as they perched themselves on high stools inside, and set their

"It was sorta crazy you takin' all that blame. Is he pretty important? Kinda more important than you are?"

Two days later back in New York Amory found in a newspaper what he had been searching fora dozen lines

which announced to whom it might concern that Mr. Amory Blaine, who "gave his address" as, etc., had been

requested to leave his hotel in Atlantic City because of entertaining in his room a lady not his wife. Then he

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

"Mr. and Mrs. Leland R. Connage are announcing the engagement of their daughter, Rosalind, to Mr. J.

He dropped the paper and lay down on his bed with a frightened, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.

She was gone, definitely, finally gone. Until now he had half unconsciously cherished the hope deep in his

heart that some day she would need him and send for him, cry that it had been a mistake, that her heart ached

only for the pain she had caused him. Never again could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting hernot

this Rosalind, harder, oldernor any beaten, broken woman that his imagination brought to the door of his

fortiesAmory had wanted her youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was selling

A day later came a crisp, terse letter from Mr. Barton in Chicago, which informed him that as three more

streetcar companies had gone into the hands of receivers he could expect for the present no further

remittances. Last of all, on a dazed Sunday night, a telegram told him of Monsignor Darcy's sudden death in

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

UNDER THE GLASS portcullis of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter

down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became gray and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly

outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision.

Under his feet a thick, ironstudded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out

glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the

The silence of the theatre behind him ended with a curious snapping sound, followed by the heavy roaring of

a rising crowd and the interlaced clatter of many voices. The matinie was over. He stood aside, edged a little

into the rain to let the throng pass. A small boy rushed out, sniffed in the damp, fresh air and turned up the

collar of his coat; came three or four couples in a great hurry; came a further scattering of people whose eyes

as they emerged glanced invariably, first at the wet street, then at the rainfilled air, finally at the dismal sky;

last a dense, strolling mass that depressed him with its heavy odor compounded of the tobacco smell of the

men and the fetid sensuousness of stale powder on women. After the thick crowd came another scattering; a

stray halfdozen; a man on crutches; finally the rattling bang of folding seats inside announced that the

New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed. Pallid men rushed by, pinching together

their coatcollars; a great swarm of tired, magpie girls from a departmentstore crowded along with shrieks

of strident laughter, three to an umbrella; a squad of marching policemen passed, already miraculously

The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment, and the numerous unpleasant aspects of city life without

money occurred to him in threatening procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subwaythe car

cards thrusting themselves at one, leering out like dull bores who grab your arm with another story; the

querulous worry as to whether some one isn't leaning on you; a man deciding not to give his seat to a woman,

hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old

cloth on human bodies and the smells of the food men ateat best just peopletoo hot or too cold, tired, worried.

He pictured the rooms where these people livedwhere the patterns of the blistered wallpapers were heavy

reiterated sunflowers on green and yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways

and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings; where even love dressed as seductiona sordid

murder around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above. And always there was the economical

stuffiness of indoor winter, and the long summers, nightmares of perspiration between sticky enveloping

walls ... dirty restaurants where careless, tired people helped themselves to sugar with their own used

coffeespoons, leaving hard brown deposits in the bowl. It was not so bad where there were only men or else

only women; it was when they were vilely herded that it all seemed so rotten. It was some shame that women

gave off at having men see them tired and poorit was some disgust that men had for women who were tired

and poor. It was dirtier than any battlefield he had seen, harder to contemplate than any actual hardship

moulded of mire and sweat and danger, it was an atmosphere wherein birth and marriage and death were

He remembered one day in the subway when a delivery boy had brought in a great funeral wreath of fresh

flowers, how the smell of it had suddenly cleared the air and given every one in the car a momentary glow.

"I detest poor people," thought Amory suddenly. "I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been

beautiful once, but it's rotten now. It's the ugliest thing in the world. It's essentially cleaner to be corrupt and

rich than it is to be innocent and poor." He seemed to see again a figure whose significance had once

impressed hima welldressed young man gazing from a club window on Fifth Avenue and saying something

to his companion with a look of utter disgust. Probably, thought Amory, what he said was: "My God! Aren't

Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people. He thought cynically how completely he was

lacking in all human sympathy. O. Henry had found in these people romance, pathos, love, hateAmory saw

only coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity. He made no selfaccusations: never any more did he reproach

himself for feelings that were natural and sincere. He accepted all his reactions as a part of him,

unchangeable, unmoral. This problem of poverty transformed, magnified, attached to some grander, more

dignified attitude might some day even be his problem; at present it roused only his profound distaste. He

walked over to Fifth Avenue, dodging the blind, black menace of umbrellas, and standing in front of

Delmonico's hailed an autobus. Buttoning his coat closely around him he climbed to the roof, where he rode

in solitary state through the thin, persistent rain, stung into alertness by the cool moisture perpetually reborn

on his cheek. Somewhere in his mind a conversation began, rather resumed its place in his attention. It was

composed not of two voices, but of one, which acted alike as questioner and answerer:

Answer.That I have about twentyfour dollars to my name. Q.You have the Lake Geneva estate.

A.I can't imagine not being able to. People make money in books and I've found that I can always do the

A.I don't know what I'll donor have I much curiosity. Tomorrow I'm going to leave New York for good. It's

A.None. I've no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence

we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness. Q.An interesting idea.

A.That's why a "good man going wrong" attracts people. They stand around and literally warm themselves at

the calories of virtue he gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in

delight"How innocent the poor child is!" They're warming themselves at her virtue. But Sarah sees the simper

A.Becoming really insincerecalling myself "not such a bad fellow," thinking I regretted my lost youth when I

only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want

to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of

eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhoodshe wants to repeat her honeymoon. I

This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind's most familiar statea grotesque blending of desires, worries,

One Hundred and Twentyseventh Streetor One Hundred and Thirtyseventh Street.... Two and three look

alikeno, not much. Seat damp ... are clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat absorbing dryness from

clothes?... Sitting on wet substance gave appendicitis, so Froggy Parker's mother said. Well, he'd had itI'll sue

the steamboat company, Beatrice said, and my uncle has a quarter interestdid Beatrice go to heaven?...

probably not He represented Beatrice's immortality, also loveaffairs of numerous dead men who surely had

never thought of him ... if it wasn't appendicitis, influenza maybe. What? One Hundred and Twentieth Street?

That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth back there. One O Two instead of One Two Seven. Rosalind

not like Beatrice, Eleanor like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier. Apartments along here expensiveprobably

hundred and fifty a monthmaybe two hundred. Uncle had only paid hundred a month for whole great big

house in Minneapolis. Questionwere the stairs on the left or right as you came in? Anyway, in 12 Univee

they were straight back and to the left. What a dirty riverwant to go down there and see if it's dirtyFrench

rivers all brown or black, so were Southern rivers. Twentyfour dollars meant four hundred and eighty

doughnuts. He could live on it three months and sleep in the park. Wonder where Jill wasJill Bayne, Fayne,

Saynewhat the devilneck hurts, darned uncomfortable seat. No desire to sleep with Jill, what could Alec see

in her? Alec had a coarse taste in women. Own taste the best; Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were

allAmerican. Eleanor would pitch, probably southpaw. Rosalind was outfield, wonderful hitter, Clara first

base, maybe. Wonder what Humbird's body looked like now. If he himself hadn't been bayonet instructor he'd

have gone up to line three months sooner, probably been killed. Where's the darned bell

The street numbers of Riverside Drive were obscured by the mist and dripping trees from anything but the

swiftest scrutiny, but Amory had finally caught sight of One One Hundred and Twentyseventh Street. He

got off and with no distinct destination followed a winding, descending sidewalk and came out facing the

river, in particular a long pier and a partitioned litter of shipyards for miniature craft: small launches, canoes,

rowboats, and catboats. He turned northward and followed the shore, jumped a small wire fence and found

himself in a great disorderly yard adjoining a dock. The hulls of many boats in various stages of repair were

around him; he smelled sawdust and paint and the scarcely distinguishable fiat odor of the Hudson. A man

The man made noncommittal noises in his throat and passed on. Amory seated himself on an overturned

While the rain drizzled on Amory looked futilely back at the stream of his life, all its glitterings and dirty

shallows. To begin with, he was still afraidnot physically afraid any more, but afraid of people and prejudice

and misery and monotony. Yet, deep in his bitter heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or

the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the

result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would

whisper ingratiatingly: "No. Genius!" That was one manifestation of fear, that voice which whispered that he

could not be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and

twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity. Probably more than any concrete vice or

failing Amory despised his own personalityhe loathed knowing that tomorrow and the thousand days after

he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a thirdrate musician or a firstclass

actor. He was ashamed of the fact that very simple and honest people usually distrusted him; that he had been

cruel, often, to those who had sunk their personalities in himseveral girls, and a man here and there through

college, that he had been an evil influence on; people who had followed him here and there into mental

adventures from which he alone rebounded unscathed. Usually, on nights like this, for there had been many

lately, he could escape from this consuming introspection by thinking of children and the infinite possibilities

of childrenhe leaned and listened and he heard a startled baby awake in a house across the street and lend a

tiny whimper to the still night. Quick as a flash he turned away, wondering with a touch of panic whether

something in the brooding despair of his mood had made a darkness in its tiny soul. He shivered. What if

some day the balance was overturned, and he became a thing that frightened children and crept into rooms in

the dark, approached dim communion with those phantoms who whispered shadowy secrets to the mad of

"YesI was perhaps an egotist in youth, but I soon found it made me morbid to think too much about

Suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to let himself go to the devilnot to go violently as a gentleman

should, but to sink safely and sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an adobe house in Mexico,

halfreclining on a rugcovered couch, his slender, artistic fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened to

guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an ageold dirge of Castile and an oliveskinned,

carminelipped girl caressed his hair. Here he might live a strange litany, delivered from right and wrong and

from the hound of heaven and from every God (except the exotic Mexican one who was pretty slack himself

and rather addicted to Oriental scents)delivered from success and hope and poverty into that long chute of

There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly: Port Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan,

Constantinople, the South Seasall lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where lust could be a mode

and expression of life, where the shades of night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of

Once he had been miraculously able to scent evil as a horse detects a broken bridge at night, but the man with

the queer feet in Phoebe's room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His instinct perceived the fetidness of

There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes; Burne Holiday was sunk from sight as though he

had never lived; Monsignor was dead. Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had

listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had

once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who

had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of

courage for the substance of wisdom. The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a worldold procession

of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like

costumed alumni at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and creeds had

in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the tremendous

significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety

generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man

in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

Womenof whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art;

whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms

of experiencehad become merely consecrations to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor,

were all removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of contributing

Amory based his loss of faith in help from others on several sweeping syllogisms. Granted that his

generation, however bruised and decimated from this Victorian war, were the heirs of progress. Waving aside

petty differences of conclusions which, although they might occasionally cause the deaths of several millions

of young men, might be explained awaysupposing that after all Bernard Shaw and Bernhardi, Bonar Law and

BethmannHollweg were mutual heirs of progress if only in agreeing against the ducking of witcheswaiving

the antitheses and approaching individually these men who seemed to be the leaders, he was repelled by the

There was, for example, Thornton Hancock, respected by half the intellectual world as an authority on life, a

man who had verified and believed the code he lived by, an educator of educators, an adviser to Presidentsyet

Amory knew that this man had, in his heart, leaned on the priest of another religion. And Monsignor, upon

whom a cardinal rested, had moments of strange and horrible insecurityinexplicable in a religion that

explained even disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you doubted the devil it was the devil that made you

doubt him. Amory had seen Monsignor go to the houses of stolid philistines, read popular novels furiously,

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

Amory was alonehe had escaped from a small enclosure into a great labyrinth. He was where Goethe was

Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people who through natural clarity or

disillusion left the enclosure and sought the labyrinth. There were men like Wells and Plato, who had, half

unconsciously, a strange, hidden orthodoxy, who would accept for themselves only what could be accepted

for all menincurable romanticists who never, for all their efforts, could enter the labyrinth as stark souls; there

were on the other hand swordlike pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed

much slower, yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line of speculative philosophy but

Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a strong distrust of all generalities and

epigrams. They were too easy, too dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the public

after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw

had sugarcoated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions of

Life was a damned muddle ... a football game with every one offside and the referee gotten rid ofevery one

Progress was a labyrinth ... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had

found it ... the invisible kingthe ilan vitalthe principle of evolution ... writing a book, starting a war, founding

Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all inquiries with himself. He was his own

best examplesitting in the rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own temperament

of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in building up the living consciousness of the race. In

selfreproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance of the labyrinth.

Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi hurried along the street, its lamps still shining like

burning eyes in a face white from a night's carouse. A melancholy siren sounded far down the river.

Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral. It was magnificently Catholic and

liturgical. Bishop O'Neill sang solemn high mass and the cardinal gave the final absolutions. Thornton

Hancock, Mrs. Lawrence, the British and Italian ambassadors, the papal delegate, and a host of friends and

priests were thereyet the inexorable shears had cut through all these threads that Monsignor had gathered into

his hands. To Amory it was a haunting grief to see him lying in his coffin, with closed hands upon his purple

vestments. His face had not changed, and, as he never knew he was dying, it showed no pain or fear. It was

Amory's dear old friend, his and the others'for the church was full of people with daft, staring faces, the most

The cardinal, like an archangel in cope and mitre, sprinkled the holy water; the organ broke into sound; the

All these people grieved because they had to some extent depended upon Monsignor. Their grief was more

than sentiment for the "crack in his voice or a certain break in his walk," as Wells put it. These people had

leaned on Monsignor's faith, his way of finding cheer, of making religion a thing of lights and shadows,

making all light and shadow merely aspects of God. People felt safe when he was near.

Of Amory's attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full realization of his disillusion, but of

Monsignor's funeral was born the romantic elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him. He found something

that he wanted, had always wanted and always would wantnot to be admired, as he had feared; not to be

loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable; he remembered the

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old

epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: "Very few things matter and nothing matters very

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

On the day that Amory started on his walk to Princeton the sky was a colorless vault, cool, high and barren of

the threat of rain. It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear

visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or

fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity;

the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian

urn. The day had put Amory in such a contemplative mood that he caused much annoyance to several

motorists who were forced to slow up considerably or else run him down. So engrossed in his thoughts was

he that he was scarcely surprised at that strange phenomenoncordiality manifested within fifty miles of

Manhattanwhen a passing car slowed down beside him and a voice hailed him. He looked up and saw a

magnificent Locomobile in which sat two middleaged men, one of them small and anxious looking,

apparently an artificial growth on the other who was large and begoggled and imposing.

"Do you want a lift?" asked the apparently artificial growth, glancing from the corner of his eye at the

The chauffeur swung open the door, and, climbing in, Amory settled himself in the middle of the back seat.

He took in his companions curiously. The chief characteristic of the big man seemed to be a great confidence

in himself set off against a tremendous boredom with everything around him. That part of his face which

protruded under the goggles was what is generally termed "strong"; rolls of not undignified fat had collected

near his chin; somewhere above was a wide thin mouth and the rough model for a Roman nose, and, below,

his shoulders collapsed without a struggle into the powerful bulk of his chest and belly. He was excellently

and quietly dressed. Amory noticed that he was inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur's head as

The smaller man was remarkable only for his complete submersion in the personality of the other. He was of

that lower secretarial type who at forty have engraved upon their business cards: "Assistant to the President,"

"Are you looking for work? Because there's lots of work," he continued rather testily. "All this talk of lack of

work. The West is especially short of labor." He expressed the West with a sweeping, lateral gesture. Amory

"Whatever your line is," said the little man, seeming to agree wisely with something Amory had said, "now is

the time of opportunity and business openings." He glanced again toward the big man, as a lawyer grilling a

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

The little man laughed mirthlessly but conscientiously. "That's what every one wants nowadays, but they

"A very natural, healthy desire. Almost all normal people want to be rich without great effortexcept the

financiers in problem plays, who want to 'crash their way through.' Don't you want easy money?"

"But," continued Amory disregarding him, "being very poor at present I am contemplating socialism as

"These bomb throwers" The little man ceased as words lurched ponderously from the big man's chest.

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

"What are you," asked the big man, "one of these parlor Bolsheviks, one of these idealists? I must say I fail to

see the difference. The idealists loaf around and write the stuff that stirs up the poor immigrants."

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

"Oh, I'll admit there's money in it eventually. Talent doesn't starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat

these days. Artists draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out ragtime for your

theatres. By the great commercializing of printing you've found a harmless, polite occupation for every

genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist who's an intellectual also. The artist who

doesn't fit the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine" "Who's he?" demanded the little

"Well," said Amory, "he's ahe's an intellectual personage not very well known at present."

The little man laughed his conscientious laugh, and stopped rather suddenly as Amory's burning eyes turned

"It always means brainy and welleducated," interrupted Amory. "It means having an active knowledge of

the race's experience." Amory decided to be very rude. He turned to the big man. "The young man," he

indicated the secretary with his thumb, and said young man as one says bellboy, with no implication of

youth, "has the usual muddled connotation of all popular words." "You object to the fact that capital controls

"Yesand I object to doing their mental work for them. It seemed to me that the root of all the business I saw

around me consisted in overworking and underpaying a bunch of dubs who submitted to it."

"Here now," said the big man, "you'll have to admit that the laboring man is certainly highly paidfive and six

hour daysit's ridiculous. You can't buy an honest day's work from a man in the tradesunions."

"You've brought it on yourselves," insisted Amory. "You people never make concessions until they're wrung

"Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by inheritance or industry or brains or

"Do you imagine that if that roadmender over there had the money he'd be any more willing to give it up?"

"In fact," continued Amory, "he'd be worse. The lower classes are narrower, less pleasant and personally

more selfishcertainly more stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question." "Just exactly what is the

"When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education," began Amory slowly, "that is, when he marries he

becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may be

unselfish, kindhearted, even just in his own way, but his first job is to provide and to hold fast. His wife

shoos him on, from ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that

hasn't any windows. He's done! Life's got him! He's no help! He's a spiritually married man."

Amory paused and decided that it wasn't such a bad phrase. "Some men," he continued, "escape the grip.

Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that

pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the

congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen

"Yes," said Amory. "He may vary from the disillusioned critic like old Thornton Hancock, all the way to

Trotsky. Now this spiritually unmarried man hasn't direct power, for unfortunately the spiritually married

man, as a byproduct of his money chase, has garnered in the great newspaper, the popular magazine, the

influential weeklyso that Mrs. Newspaper, Mrs. Magazine, Mrs. Weekly can have a better limousine than

"It makes wealthy men the keepers of the world's intellectual conscience and, of course, a man who has

money under one set of social institutions quite naturally can't risk his family's happiness by letting the

"Well, my first point is that through a mixture of conditions of which the family is the first, there are these

two sorts of brains. One sort takes human nature as it finds it, uses its timidity, its weakness, and its strength

for its own ends. Opposed is the man who, being spiritually unmarried, continually seeks for new systems

that will control or counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not life that's complicated, it's the

struggle to guide and control life. That is his struggle. He is a part of progressthe spiritually married man is

The big man produced three big cigars, and proffered them on his huge palm. The little man took one, Amory

"Go on talking," said the big man. "I've been wanting to hear one of you fellows."

"Modern life," began Amory again, "changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster

than it ever has beforepopulations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations,

economic interdependence, racial questions, andwe're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very

much faster." He slightly emphasized the last words and the chauffeur unconsciously increased the speed of

the car. Amory and the big man laughed; the little man laughed, too, after a pause.

"Every child," said Amory, "should have an equal start. If his father can endow him with a good physique and

his mother with some common sense in his early education, that should be his heritage. If the father can't give

him a good physique, if the mother has spent in chasing men the years in which she should have been

preparing herself to educate her children, so much the worse for the child. He shouldn't be artificially

bolstered up with money, sent to these horrible tutoring schools, dragged through college ... Every boy ought

to have an equal start." "All right," said the big man, his goggles indicating neither approval nor objection.

"Noit merely failed. If we had government ownership we'd have the best analytical business minds in the

government working for something besides themselves. We'd have Mackays instead of Burlesons; we'd have

Morgans in the Treasury Department; we'd have Hills running interstate commerce. We'd have the best

"They wouldn't give their best efforts for nothing. McAdoo" "No," said Amory, shaking his head. "Money

isn't the only stimulus that brings out the best that's in a man, even in America."

"It is, right now. But if it were made illegal to have more than a certain amount the best men would all flock

"No, it isn't silly. It's quite plausible. If you'd gone to college you'd have been struck by the fact that the men

there would work twice as hard for any one of a hundred petty honors as those other men did who were

"Not by a darned sightunless we're all children. Did you ever see a grown man when he's trying for a secret

societyor a rising family whose name is up at some club? They'll jump when they hear the sound of the word.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom.

We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way. We've made a world where that's

necessary. Let me tell you"Amory became emphatic"if there were ten men insured against either wealth or

starvation, and offered a green ribbon for five hours' work a day and a blue ribbon for ten hours' work a day,

nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon. That competitive instinct only wants a badge. If

the size of their house is the badge they'll sweat their heads off for that. If it's only a blue ribbon, I damn near

"I know it," said Amory nodding sadly. "It doesn't matter any more though. I think these people are going to

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

Amory wished he knew the statistics of property owners and nonproperty owners; he decided to change the

"How can they get it without taking it? For years people have been stalled off with promises. Socialism may

not be progress, but the threat of the red flag is certainly the inspiring force of all reform. You've got to be

sensational to get attention." "Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I suppose?" "Quite possibly,"

admitted Amory. "Of course, it's overflowing just as the French Revolution did, but I've no doubt that it's

"You won't listen to the moderates, and it's almost too late. The truth is that the public has done one of those

startling and amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years. They've seized an idea."

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

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

"Oh, shut up!" said Amory briskly and, paying no attention to the little man's enraged stare, he went on with

his argument. "The human stomach" he began; but the big man interrupted rather impatiently.

"I'm letting you talk, you know," he said, "but please avoid stomachs. I've been feeling mine all day.

Anyway, I don't agree with onehalf you've said. Government ownership is the basis of your whole

argument, and it's invariably a beehive of corruption. Men won't work for blue ribbons, that's all rot."

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

"There are certain things which are human nature," he asserted with an owllike look, "which always have

Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly. "Listen to that! That's what makes me

discouraged with progress. Listen to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have

been changed by the will of mana hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check

by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated

muttonheads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and

philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity's service. It's a flat impeachment of all that's worth while in

human nature. Every person over twentyfive years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought to be

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

remarks to the big man. "These quartereducated, staleminded men such as your friend here, who think they

think, every question that comes up, you'll find his type in the usual ghastly muddle. One minute it's 'the

brutality and inhumanity of these Prussians'the next it's 'we ought to exterminate the whole German people.'

They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.' One

minute they call Wilson 'just a dreamer, not practical'a year later they rail at him for making his dreams

realities. They haven't clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all

change. They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay

the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a

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

"You're catching it pretty heavy, Garvin; how do you feel?" The little man made an attempt to smile and act

as if the whole matter were so ridiculous as to be beneath notice. But Amory was not through.

"The theory that people are fit to govern themselves rests on this man. If he can be educated to think clearly,

concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms,

then I'm a militant Socialist. If he can't, then I don't think it matters much what happens to man or his

"Which may only mean that I have neither been corrupted nor made timid by contemporary experience. I

possess the most valuable experience, the experience of the race, for in spite of going to college I've managed

"It's not all rubbish," cried Amory passionately. "This is the first time in my life I've argued Socialism. It's the

only panacea I know. I'm restless. My whole generation is restless. I'm sick of a system where the richest man

gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a

button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents I'd not be content to work ten years, condemned either to

"That doesn't matter," exclaimed Amory. "My position couldn't be worse. A social revolution might land me

on top. Of course I'm selfish. It seems to me I've been a fish out of water in too many outworn systems. I was

probably one of the two dozen men in my class at college who got a decent education; still they'd let any

welltutored flathead play football and I was ineligible, because some silly old men thought we should all

profit by conic sections. I loathed the army. I loathed business. I'm in love with change and I've killed my

"That, at least, is true," Amory insisted. "Reform won't catch up to the needs of civilization unless it's made

to. A laissezfaire policy is like spoiling a child by saying he'll turn out all right in the end. He will if he's

"But you don't believe all this Socialist patter you talk." "I don't know. Until I talked to you I hadn't thought

"You puzzle me," said the big man, "but you're all alike. They say Bernard Shaw, in spite of his doctrines, is

the most exacting of all dramatists about his royalties. To the last farthing." "Well," said Amory, "I simply

state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generationwith every reason to throw my mind and

pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as

a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with

new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living

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

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

"He wasaquite a fine boy. We were very close." Amory began to perceive a resemblance between the

father and the dead son and he told himself that there had been all along a sense of familiarity. Jesse

Ferrenby, the man who in college had borne off the crown that he had aspired to. It was all so far away. What

little boys they had been, working for blue ribbons The car slowed up at the entrance to a great estate,

"Thank you, Mr. Ferrenby, but I've got to get on." The big man held out his hand. Amory saw that the fact

that he had known Jesse more than outweighed any disfavor he had created by his opinions. What ghosts

"Goodby!" shouted Mr. Ferrenby, as the car turned the corner and started up the drive. "Good luck to you

Eight hours from Princeton Amory sat down by the Jersey roadside and looked at the frostbitten country.

Nature as a rather coarse phenomenon composed largely of flowers that, when closely inspected, appeared

motheaten, and of ants that endlessly traversed blades of grass, was always disillusioning; nature

represented by skies and waters and far horizons was more likable. Frost and the promise of winter thrilled

him now, made him think of a wild battle between St. Regis and Groton, ages ago, seven years agoand of an

autumn day in France twelve months before when he had lain in tall grass, his platoon flattened down close

around him, waiting to tap the shoulders of a Lewis gunner. He saw the two pictures together with somewhat

the same primitive exaltationtwo games he had played, differing in quality of acerbity, linked in a way that

differed them from Rosalind or the subject of labyrinths which were, after all, the business of life.

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

"It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into

my life. "There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a

friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friendall because these things may be the best possible

The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex. He was beginning to identify evil with

the strong phallic worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with evil was beautybeauty,

still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor's voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life

like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward

it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most

After all, it had too many associations with license and indulgence. Weak things were often beautiful, weak

things were never good. And in this new loneness of his that had been selected for what greatness he might

achieve, beauty must be relative or, itself a harmony, it would make only a discord. In a sense this gradual

renunciation of beauty was the second step after his disillusion had been made complete. He felt that he was

leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so much more important to be a

His mind turned a corner suddenly and he found himself thinking of the Catholic Church. The idea was

strong in him that there was a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary, and

religion to Amory meant the Church of Rome. Quite conceivably it was an empty ritual but it was seemingly

the only assimilative, traditionary bulwark against the decay of morals. Until the great mobs could be

educated into a moral sense some one must cry: "Thou shalt not!" Yet any acceptance was, for the present,

impossible. He wanted time and the absence of ulterior pressure. He wanted to keep the tree without

The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o'clock to the golden beauty of four. Afterward he

walked through the dull ache of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at twilight he came

to a graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and

shadows everywhere. On an impulse he considered trying to open the door of a rusty iron vault built into the

side of a hill; a vault washed clean and covered with lateblooming, weepy wateryblue flowers that might

He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain. Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in

having lived. All the broken columns and clasped hands and doves and angels meant romances. He fancied

that in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate as to whether his eyes were brown or

blue, and he hoped quite passionately that his grave would have about it an air of many, many years ago. It

seemed strange that out of a row of Union soldiers two or three made him think of dead loves and dead

Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a lateburning

lightand suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of

the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed

romantically on the mistakes and halfforgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new

generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined

finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than

the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all

Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himselfart, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be,

he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteriahe could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel,

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the

regret for his lost youthyet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love

of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. Butoh, Rosalind! Rosalind!...

"It's all a poor substitute at best," he said sadly. And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why

he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed....

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."