F. Scott Fitzgerald

“ She had been pleased for a part of the day--the early afternoon--in walking along that Broadway of Harlem, One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, with her nostrils alert to many odors, and her mind excited by the extraordinary beauty of some Italian children. It affected her curiously--as Fifth Avenue had affected her once, in the days when, with the placid confidence of beauty, she had known that it was all hers, every shop and all it held, every adult toy glittering in a window, all hers for the asking. ”

“ Or what becomes of everybody you used to know and have so much in common with?"
"You drift apart," suggested Muriel with the appropriate dreamy look.
"They change," said Gloria. "All the qualities that they don't use in their daily lives get cobwebbed up."
"The last thing he said to me," recollected Anthony, "was that he was going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for."
Muriel caught at this quickly.
"That's what you ought to do," she exclaimed triumphantly. "Of course I shouldn't think anybody would want to work for nothing. But it'd give you something to do. ”

“ He was nervous and craving for a drink.
"My golly!" he cried, "where do you live? I can't keep walking forever."
"Your endurance is all mental, eh?" returned Dick sharply. "Well, I live right here."
He turned in at the apartment house on Forty-ninth Street, and a few minutes later they were in a large new room with an open fireplace and four walls lined with books. A colored butler served them gin rickeys, and an hour vanished politely with the mellow shortening of their drinks and the glow of a light mid-autumn fire.
"The arts are very old," said Anthony after a while. ”

“ Anthony shook his head silently.
"That's funny," said Dick. "I always thought that you and Maury would write some day, and now he's grown to be a sort of tight-fisted aristocrat, and you're--"
"I'm the bad example."
"I wonder why?"
"You probably think you know," suggested Anthony, with an effort at concentration. "The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. ”

“ In a taciturn way she was happy to see Muriel. She greeted Anthony with a casual "Hi!"
"I've been talking philosophy with your husband," cried the irrepressible Miss Kane.
"We took up some fundamental concepts," said Anthony, a faint smile disturbing his pale cheeks, paler still under two days' growth of beard.
Oblivious to his irony Muriel rehashed her contention. When she had done, Gloria said quietly:
"Anthony's right. It's no fun to go around when you have the sense that people are looking at you in a certain way." ”

“ Looking up and seeing Dick and Gloria he put his head critically on one side and motioned them back.
"Anthony!" cried Gloria tensely, "we've won! They reversed the decision!"
"Don't come in," he murmured wanly, "you'll muss them. I'm sorting, and I know you'll step in them. Everything always gets mussed."
"What are you doing?" demanded Dick in astonishment. "Going back to childhood? Don't you realize you've won the suit? They've reversed the decision of the lower courts. You're worth thirty millions!"
Anthony only looked at him reproachfully. ”

“ Richard Caramel noticed that Anthony was wearing a soiled shirt, that his cuffs were slightly but perceptibly frayed, that his eyes were set in half-moons the color of cigar smoke.
"So I gathered," he said, fixing his friend with his bright-yellow eye. "But where and how is Gloria? My God, Anthony, I've been hearing the dog-gonedest stories about you two even out in California--and when I get back to New York I find you've sunk absolutely out of sight. Why don't you pull yourself together?" ”

“ She was silent for a moment as if considering, then:
"Anthony," she cried suddenly, "two hundred a month is worse than nothing. Let's sell all the bonds and put the thirty thousand dollars in the bank--and if we lose the case we can live in Italy for three years, and then just die." ”

“ Unwillingly Anthony glanced at Dick's face and caught a slight uncertainty there.
"I've put my own books in, of course," said Richard Caramel hastily, "though one or two of them are uneven--I'm afraid I wrote a little too fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don't believe in false modesty. Of course some of the critics haven't paid so much attention to me since I've been established--but, after all, it's not the critics that count. They're just sheep." ”

“ Gloria got to her feet. It had suddenly occurred to her where he would probably go first.
"Anthony!" she called after him, "hadn't you better leave two dollars with me? You'll only need car-fare."
The outer door slammed--he had pretended not to hear her. She stood for a moment looking after him; then she went into the bathroom among her tragic unguents and began preparations for washing her hair.
Down at Sammy's he found Parker Allison and Pete Lytell sitting alone at a table, drinking whiskey sours. ”

“ Anthony got his five cents change and started for the Boul' Mich', a popular dancing resort on Forty-fifth Street. It was nearly ten but the streets were dark and sparsely peopled until the theatres should eject their spawn an hour later. Anthony knew the Boul' Mich', for he had been there with Gloria during the year before, and he remembered the existence of a rule that patrons must be in evening dress. Well, he would not go up-stairs--he would send a boy up for Bloeckman and wait for him in the lower hall. ”

“ Perhaps in two years I might rise to fifty dollars a week--with luck. That's if I could get a job at all; there's an awful lot of unemployment. Well, suppose I made fifty a week. Do you think I'd be any happier? Do you think that if I don't get this money of my grandfather's life will be endurable?"
Muriel smiled complacently.
"Well," she said, "that may be clever but it isn't common sense."
A few minutes later Gloria came in seeming to bring with her into the room some dark color, indeterminate and rare. ”

“ The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly--when his purse hung heavy again even romance might fly back to perch upon it--the romance of blue canals in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole after rain, and of women, women who changed, dissolved, melted into other women and receded from his life, but who were always beautiful and always young. ”

“ It is a truth set at the heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never answers--this force intangible as air, more definite than death.
Richard Caramel Early in the summer Anthony resigned from his last club, the Amsterdam. He had come to visit it hardly twice a year, and the dues were a recurrent burden. He had joined it on his return from Italy because it had been his grandfather's club and his father's, and because it was a club that, given the opportunity, one indisputably joined--but as a matter of fact he had preferred the Harvard Club, largely because of Dick and Maury. ”

“ On the subway Anthony had counted his money and found that he had almost four dollars. He could pay for two rounds at fifty cents a drink--which meant that he would have six drinks. Then he would go over to Sixth Avenue and get twenty dollars and a pawn ticket in exchange for his watch.
"Well, roughnecks," he said jovially, "how's the life of crime?"
"Pretty good," said Allison. He winked at Pete Lytell. "Too bad you're a married man. We've got some pretty good stuff lined up for about eleven o'clock, when the shows let out. Oh, boy! Yes, sir--too bad he's married--isn't it, Pete?" ”

“ With growing discouragement, with growing befuddlement, he crossed the street and walked back toward Forty-third. On the corner near Sammy's he paused undecided--if he went back to the apartment, as he felt his body required, he would lay himself open to bitter reproach; yet, now that the pawnshops were closed, he had no notion where to get the money. He decided finally that he might ask Parker Allison, after all--but he approached Sammy's only to find the door locked and the lights out. He looked at his watch; nine-thirty. He began walking. ”

“ She turned a page and learned that a candidate for Congress was being accused of atheism by an opponent. Gloria's surprise vanished when she found that the charges were false. The candidate had merely denied the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He admitted, under pressure, that he gave full credence to the stroll upon the water.
Finishing her first drink, Gloria got herself a second. After slipping on a negligee and making herself comfortable on the lounge, she became conscious that she was miserable and that the tears were rolling down her cheeks. ”

“ I'm sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there's a place for the romanticist in literature."
Anthony tried to remember what he had read lately of Richard Caramel's. There was "A Shave-tail in France," a novel called "The Land of Strong Men," and several dozen short stories, which were even worse. It had become the custom among young and clever reviewers to mention Richard Caramel with a smile of scorn. "Mr." Richard Caramel, they called him. His corpse was dragged obscenely through every literary supplement. He was accused of making a great fortune by writing trash for the movies. ”

“ For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, Anthony felt a touch of the old pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard Caramel continued:
"My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackeray of America--because of my New York novel."
"Yes," Anthony managed to muster, "I suppose there's a good deal in what you say."
He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He, knew that he would have changed places with Dick unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well, then--can a man disparage his life-work so readily? ... ”

“ He counted more on the personal attacks that they had levelled at Shuttleworth than on the more sheerly legal aspects of the proceedings.
Dressed, he poured himself a drink of whiskey and then went into Gloria's room, where he found her already wide awake. She had been in bed for a week, humoring herself, Anthony fancied, though the doctor had said that she had best not be disturbed.
"Good morning," she murmured, without smiling. Her eyes seemed unusually large and dark.
"How do you feel?" he asked grudgingly. "Better?" ”

“ You talk as if you and Gloria were in the middle classes."
"Why pretend we're not? I hate people who claim to be great aristocrats when they can't even keep up the appearances of it."
"Do you think a person has to have money to be aristocratic?"
Muriel ... the horrified democrat ...!
"Why, of course. Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine--courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing--can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity." ”

“ Muriel intervened quickly:
"I met a girl who knew Maury, the other day, and she says he doesn't drink any more. He's getting pretty cagey."
"Doesn't?"
"Practically not at all. He's making piles of money. He's sort of changed since the war. He's going to marry a girl in Philadelphia who has millions, Ceci Larrabee--anyhow, that's what Town Tattle said."
"He's thirty-three," said Anthony, thinking aloud. But it's odd to imagine his getting married. I used to think he was so brilliant."
"He was," murmured Gloria, "in a way."
"But brilliant people don't settle down in business--or do they? ”

“ She did not know that this gesture of hers was years older than history, that, for a hundred generations of men, intolerable and persistent grief has offered that gesture, of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more profound, more powerful than the God made in the image of man, and before which that God, did he exist, would be equally impotent. ”

“ The Samaritan must needs help him in--and climb in after him.
"See here, fella," said he, "you're soused and you're bunged up, and you won't be able to get in your house 'less somebody carries you in, so I'm going with you, and I know you'll make it all right with me. Where d'you live?"
With some reluctance Anthony gave his address. Then, as the cab moved off, he leaned his head against the man's shoulder and went into a shadowy, painful torpor. When he awoke, the man had lifted him from the cab in front of the apartment on Claremont Avenue and was trying to set him on his feet. ”

“ As they walked along he continued in a burst of exasperation:
"And how about your grandfather's money--you going to get it?"
"Well," answered Anthony resentfully, "that old fool Haight seems hopeful, especially because people are tired of reformers right now--you know it might make a slight difference, for instance, if some judge thought that Adam Patch made it harder for him to get liquor."
"You can't do without money," said Dick sententiously. "Have you tried to write any--lately?" ”

“ At two o'clock Richard Caramel's car arrived at the door and, when he phoned up, Anthony took Gloria down in the elevator and walked with her to the curb.
She told her cousin that it was sweet of him to take her riding. "Don't be simple," Dick replied disparagingly. "It's nothing." ”

“ Seems I'd given these Bedros people a check for sixty for that last case of liquor--and I only had forty-five dollars in the bank. Well, the Bedros people deposited fifteen dollars to my account and drew the whole thing out."
In her ignorance Gloria conjured up a spectre of imprisonment and disgrace.
"Oh, they won't do anything," he assured her. "Bootlegging's too risky a business. They'll send me a bill for fifteen dollars and I'll pay it." ”