Miss Fitzgerald

“ Fitzgerald!" said Flora. "I have heard her allude to her lost children, but I had no idea she had suffered so much."
"She did suffer," replied Mrs. Bright, "though not so deeply as some natures would have suffered in the same circumstances. Her present situation is far from being enviable. Her father is a hard, grasping man, and he was greatly vexed that her splendid marriage turned out to be such a failure. It must be very mortifying to her to depend upon him mainly for the support of herself and son. I pitied her, and I pitied Mr. Fitzgerald too. ”

“ At her happiness, a gorgeous sentiment welled into his eyes, choked him up, set his nerves a-tingle, and filled his throat with husky and vibrant emotion. There was a hush upon the room. The careless violins and saxophones, the shrill rasping complaint of a child near by, the voice of the violet-hatted girl at the next table, all moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the shining floor—and they two, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely remote, quiet. Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades ”

“ Her hair, full of a heavenly glamour, was gay against the winter color of the room.
Anthony moved about, magician-like, turning the mushroom lamp into an orange glory. The stirred fire burnished the copper andirons on the hearth——
"I'm a solid block of ice," murmured Gloria casually, glancing around with eyes whose irises were of the most delicate and transparent bluish white. "What a slick fire! We found a place where you could stand on an iron-bar grating, sort of, and it blew warm air up at you—but Dick wouldn't wait there with me. I told him to go on alone and let me be happy." ”

“ The lady brought her to and drove her home in her car. It had occurred to the estimable Gloria that she was probably with child.
She lay upon the long lounge down-stairs. Day was slipping warmly out the window, touching the late roses on the porch pillars.
"All I think of ever is that I love you," she wailed. "I value my body because you think it's beautiful. And this body of mine—of yours—to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It's simply intolerable. Oh, Anthony, I'm not afraid of the pain." ”

“ Her entrancement had increased—her eyes rested upon a Semitic violinist who swayed his shoulders to the rhythm of the year's mellowest fox-trot:
"Something—goes Ring-a-ting-a-ling-a-ling Right in-your ear—"
Again she spoke, from the centre of this pervasive illusion of her own. It amazed him. It was like blasphemy from the mouth of a child.
"I'm like they are—like Japanese lanterns and crape paper, and the music of that orchestra."
"You're a young idiot!" he insisted wildly. She shook her blond head.
"No, I'm not. I am like them.... You ought to see.... You don't know me." ”

“ But so was Gloria. They were both willing—anxious; they assured each other of it. The evening ended on a note of tremendous sentiment, the majesty of leisure, the ill health of Adam Patch, love at any cost.
"Anthony!" she called over the banister one afternoon a week later, "there's some one at the door." Anthony, who had been lolling in the hammock on the sun-speckled south porch, strolled around to the front of the house. A foreign car, large and impressive, crouched like an immense and saturnine bug at the foot of the path. A man in a soft pongee suit, with cap to match, hailed him. ”

“ She let men "pick her up"; she let them kiss her, and even allowed certain other liberties to be forced upon her, but she did not add to her trio. After several months the strength of her resolution—or rather the poignant expediency of her fears—was worn away. She grew restless drowsing there out of life and time while the summer months faded. The soldiers she met were either obviously below her or, less obviously, above her—in which case they desired only to use her; they were Yankees, harsh and ungracious; they swarmed in large crowds.... And then she met Anthony. ”

“ There was the remembered dust of powder over her tan--when he kissed her face it was damp around the corners of her hair; there was the flash of a white face under his own, the arc of a shoulder.
"It's impossible," he said to himself. In a minute he was out in the street marching along toward the Muette, or away from it, his small brief-case still in his hand, his gold-headed stick held at a sword-like angle.
Rosemary returned to her desk and finished a letter to her mother. ”

“ Forster had never seen her before, but when she was pressed to sing again and again, and refused positively, I was amazed to see Forster triumphantly passing through the crowded room, the fair one on his arm, he patting one of her small hands which he held in his own! She was flattered immensely and unresisting; the gallant Foster had carried all before him. This was his way, never would he be second fiddle anywhere if he could help it. Not a bad principle for any one if they can only manage it. ”

“ He sat down on the side of the bed and slowly shook his head.
"You're no good," he said decisively, talking unconsciously as Gloria might have talked to him. "This sort of thing isn't fair to me, you know."
"Come closer." Whatever he might say Dot was happy now. He cared for her. She had brought him to her side.
"Oh, God," said Anthony hopelessly. As weariness rolled along its inevitable wave his anger subsided, receded, vanished. He collapsed suddenly, fell sobbing beside her on the bed. ”

“ True, there were the laundry-bags, there was Gloria's appetite, there was Anthony's tendency to brood and his imaginative "nervousness," but there were intervals also of an unhoped-for serenity. Close together on the porch they would wait for the moon to stream across the silver acres of farmland, jump a thick wood and tumble waves of radiance at their feet. In such a moonlight Gloria's face was of a pervading, reminiscent white, and with a modicum of effort they would slip off the blinders of custom and each would find in the other almost the quintessential romance of the vanished June. ”

“ Ah, la belle dame sans merci who lived in his heart, made known to him in transitory fading splendor by dark eyes in the Ritz-Carlton, by a shadowy glance from a passing carriage in the Bois de Boulogne! But those nights were only part of a song, a remembered glory—here again were the faint winds, the illusions, the eternal present with its promise of romance.
"Oh," she whispered, "do you love me? Do you love me?"
The spell was broken—the drifted fragments of the stars became only light, the singing down the street diminished to a monotone, to the whimper of locusts in the grass. ”

“ His arms were around her; he pulled her head down upon his shoulder. "What is it, my own Gloria? Tell me."
"We're going away," she sobbed. "Oh, Anthony, it's sort of the first place we've lived together. Our two little beds here—side by side—they'll be always waiting for us, and we're never coming back to 'em any more."
She was tearing at his heart as she always could. Sentiment came over him, rushed into his eyes.
"Gloria, why, we're going on to another room. And two other little beds. We're going to be together all our lives." ”

“ He had never met any one like her before. He besought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he didn't want to fall in love. He wasn't coming to see her any more—already she had haunted too many of his ways.
What delicious romance! His true reaction was neither fear nor sorrow—only this deep delight in being with her that colored the banality of his words and made the mawkish seem sad and the posturing seem wise. He would come back—eternally. He should have known! ”

“ A stout woman upholstered in velvet, her flabby cheeks too much massaged, swirled by with her poodle straining at its leash—the effect being given of a tug bringing in an ocean liner. Just behind them a man in a striped blue suit, walking slue-footed in white-spatted feet, grinned at the sight and catching Anthony's eye, winked through the glass. Anthony laughed, thrown immediately into that humor in which men and women were graceless and absurd phantasms, grotesquely curved and rounded in a rectangular world of their own building. ”

“ Out, Edith," he mumbled pleasantly. "S'misterin Misterout."
"'Smisterinanout," said Peter proudly.
But Edith stared straight by them, her eyes fixed on some infinite speck in the gallery above her. She nodded slightly to the stout man, who advanced bull-like and with a sturdy brisk gesture pushed Mr. In and Mr. Out to either side. Through this alley he and Edith walked.
But ten paces farther on Edith stopped again—stopped and pointed to a short, dark soldier who was eying the crowd in general, and the tableau of Mr. In and Mr. Out in particular, with a sort of puzzled, spell-bound awe. ”

“ Gloria shook her fist defiantly at the four walls.
"I'm so glad to go!" she cried, "so glad. Oh, my God, how I hate this house!"
So the brilliant and beautiful lady went up with her husband to New York. On the very train that bore them away they quarrelled--her bitter words had the frequency, the regularity, the inevitability of the stations they passed.
"Don't be cross," begged Anthony piteously. "We've got nothing but each other, after all."
"We haven't even that, most of the time," cried Gloria. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Think you've got the best name I've heard," she was saying, still apparently to herself; her glance rested on him a moment and then flitted past him—to the Italian bracket-lamps clinging like luminous yellow turtles at intervals along the walls, to the books row upon row, then to her cousin on the other side. "Anthony Patch. Only you ought to look sort of like a horse, with a long narrow face—and you ought to be in tatters." ”

“ He felt that life had rejected him.
"Rosalind! Rosalind!" He poured the words softly into the half-darkness 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. ”

“ Myra sprang up, her cheeks pink with bruised vanity, the great bow on the back of her head trembling sympathetically.
“I hate you!” she cried. “Don't you ever dare to speak to me again!”
“What?” stammered Amory.
“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 had not heretofore been aware. ”

“ The young gentleman modestly disclaimed the compliment to his musical powers, but eagerly urged his mother's request. As he bent near the cantatrice, waiting for her reply, her watchful husband again noticed a quick flush suffusing her face, succeeded by deadly pallor. Gently moving young Fitzgerald aside, he said in a low tone, "Are you not well, my dear?"
She raised her eyes to his with a look of distress, and replied: "No,
I am not well. Please order the carriage." ”

“ Nicole was invariably somewhat surprised that by turning in the other direction past a bed of peonies she walked into an area so green and cool that the leaves and petals were curled with tender damp.
Knotted at her throat she wore a lilac scarf that even in the achromatic sunshine cast its color up to her face and down around her moving feet in a lilac shadow. Her face was hard, almost stern, save for the soft gleam of piteous doubt that looked from her green eyes. ”

“ Haight when he sent for you about the suit."
Anthony got to his feet and switched on the lights.
"See here!" he cried, blinking, "I'm getting sick of that sharp tongue of yours."
"Well, what are you going to do about it?"
"Do you think I'm particularly happy?" he continued, ignoring her question. "Do you think I don't know we're not living as we ought to?"
In an instant Gloria stood trembling beside him.
"I won't stand it!" she burst out. "I won't be lectured to. You and your suffering! You're just a pitiful weakling and you always have been!" ”

“ Rags Martin-Jones was not a dog. She was half a girl and half a flower, and as she shook hands with Captain Sir Howard George Witchcraft she smiled as if some one had told her the newest, freshest joke in the world. All the people who had not already left the pier felt that smile trembling on the April air and turned around to see. ”

“ If now she wished for a child, even a child of the Anthony who sought her bed blind drunk, she neither said so nor gave any show or sign of interest in children. It is doubtful if she could have made it clear to any one what it was she wanted, or indeed what there was to want—a lonely, lovely woman, thirty now, retrenched behind some impregnable inhibition born and coexistent with her beauty.
One afternoon when the snow was dirty again along Riverside Drive, Gloria, who had been to the grocer's, entered the apartment to find Anthony pacing the floor in a state of aggravated nervousness. ”