The Beautiful and Damned E-Book

F.Scott Fitzgerald

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, first published in 1922, which brilliantly satirizes a doomed and glamorous marriage of would-be Jazz Age aristocrats Anthony and Gloria Patch: they are beautiful, shallow, pleasure-seeking, and vain. As they await the inheritance of his grandfather’s fortune, their reckless marriage sways under the influence of alcohol and avarice and disintegrates under the weight of their expectations, dissipation, jealousy and aimlessness...

Leseprobe

Contents

Book One

1. Anthony Patch

2. Portrait of a Siren

3. The Connoisseur of Kisses

Book Two

1. The Radiant Hour

2. Symposium

3. The Broken Lute

Book Three

1. A Matter of Civilization

2. A Matter of Aesthetics

3. No Matter!

Book One

Chapter I

Anthony Patch

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!”–yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch–not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward–a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

A Worthy Man and His Gifted Son

Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.

Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as “Cross Patch,” left his father’s farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment. He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will he gathered to himself some seventy-five million dollars.

This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was then that he determined, after a severe attack of sclerosis, to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world. He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind, under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms on all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the age. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, a campaign which went on through fifteen years, during which he displayed himself a rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, and an intolerable bore. The year in which this story opens found him wearying; his campaign had grown desultory; 1861 was creeping up slowly on 1895; his thoughts ran a great deal on the Civil War, somewhat on his dead wife and son, almost infinitesimally on his grandson Anthony.

Early in his career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty, Alicia Withers, who brought him one hundred thousand dollars and an impeccable entré into the banking circles of New York. Immediately and rather spunkily she had borne him a son and, as if completely devitalized by the magnificence of this performance, she had thenceforth effaced herself within the shadowy dimensions of the nursery. The boy, Adam Ulysses Patch, became an inveterate joiner of clubs, connoisseur of good form, and driver of tandems–at the astonishing age of twenty-six he began his memoirs under the title “New York Society as I Have Seen It.” On the rumor of its conception this work was eagerly bid for among publishers, but as it proved after his death to be immoderately verbose and overpoweringly dull, it never obtained even a private printing.

This Fifth Avenue Chesterfield married at twenty-two. His wife was Henrietta Lebrune, the Boston “Society Contralto,” and the single child of the union was, at the request of his grandfather, christened Anthony Comstock Patch. When he went to Harvard, the Comstock dropped out of his name to a nether hell of oblivion and was never heard of thereafter.

Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together–so often had it faced his eyes in childhood that it had acquired the impersonality of furniture, but every one who came into his bedroom regarded it with interest. It showed a dandy of the nineties, spare and handsome, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a little boy with long brown curls, dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit. This was Anthony at five, the year of his mother’s death.

His memories of the Boston Society Contralto were nebulous and musical. She was a lady who sang, sang, sang, in the music room of their house on Washington Square–sometimes with guests scattered all about her, the men with their arms folded, balanced breathlessly on the edges of sofas, the women with their hands in their laps, occasionally making little whispers to the men and always clapping very briskly and uttering cooing cries after each song–and often she sang to Anthony alone, in Italian or French or in a strange and terrible dialect which she imagined to be the speech of the Southern negro.

His recollections of the gallant Ulysses, the first man in America to roll the lapels of his coat, were much more vivid. After Henrietta Lebrune Patch had “joined another choir,” as her widower huskily remarked from time to time, father and son lived up at grampa’s in Tarrytown, and Ulysses came daily to Anthony’s nursery and expelled pleasant, thick-smelling words for sometimes as much as an hour. He was continually promising Anthony hunting trips and fishing trips and excursions to Atlantic City, “oh, some time soon now”; but none of them ever materialized. One trip they did take; when Anthony was eleven they went abroad, to England and Switzerland, and there in the best hotel in Lucerne his father died with much sweating and grunting and crying aloud for air. In a panic of despair and terror Anthony was brought back to America, wedded to a vague melancholy that was to stay beside him through the rest of his life.

Past and Person of the Hero

At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his parents had died and his grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly, until, for the first time since her marriage, her person held for one day an unquestioned supremacy over her own drawing room. So to Anthony life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed–it soothed him. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on.

His favorite diversion until he was fourteen was his stamp collection; enormous, as nearly exhaustive as a boy’s could be–his grandfather considered fatuously that it was teaching him geography. So Anthony kept up a correspondence with a half dozen “Stamp and Coin” companies and it was rare that the mail failed to bring him new stamp-books or packages of glittering approval sheets–there was a mysterious fascination in transferring his acquisitions interminably from one book to another. His stamps were his greatest happiness and he bestowed impatient frowns on any one who interrupted him at play with them; they devoured his allowance every month, and he lay awake at night musing untiringly on their variety and many-colored splendor.

At sixteen he had lived almost entirely within himself, an inarticulate boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely bewildered by his contemporaries. The two preceding years had been spent in Europe with a private tutor, who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing; it would “open doors,” it would be a tremendous tonic, it would give him innumerable self-sacrificing and devoted friends. So he went to Harvard–there was no other logical thing to be done with him.

Oblivious to the social system, he lived for a while alone and unsought in a high room in Beck Hall–a slim dark boy of medium height with a shy sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile first editions of Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, and a yellowed illegible autograph letter of Keats’s, finding later that he had been amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy, amassed a rather pathetic collection of silk pajamas, brocaded dressing-gowns, and neckties too flamboyant to wear; in this secret finery he would parade before a mirror in his room or lie stretched in satin along his window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor, breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have a part.

Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but secretly pleased him–he began going out, at first a little and then a great deal. He made the Pudding. He drank–quietly and in the proper tradition. It was said of him that had he not come to college so young he might have “done extremely well.” In 1909, when he graduated, he was only twenty years old.

Then abroad again–to Rome this time, where he dallied with architecture and painting in turn, took up the violin, and wrote some ghastly Italian sonnets, supposedly the ruminations of a thirteenth-century monk on the joys of the contemplative life. It became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his grandfather’s called on him, and had he so desired he might have been persona gratawith the diplomatic set–indeed, he found that his inclinations tended more and more toward conviviality, but that long adolescent aloofness and consequent shyness still dictated to his conduct.

He returned to America in 1912 because of one of his grandfather’s sudden illnesses, and after an excessively tiresome talk with the perpetually convalescent old man he decided to put off until his grandfather’s death the idea of living permanently abroad. After a prolonged search he took an apartment on Fifty-second Street and to all appearances settled down.

In 1913 Anthony Patch’s adjustment of himself to the universe was in process of consummation. Physically, he had improved since his undergraduate days–he was still too thin but his shoulders had widened and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year. He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span–his friends declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled. His nose was too sharp; his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined to droop perceptibly in moments of unhappiness, but his blue eyes were charming, whether alert with intelligence or half closed in an expression of melancholy humor.

One of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature essential to the Aryan ideal, he was yet, here and there, considered handsome–moreover, he was very clean, in appearance and in reality, with that especial cleanness borrowed from beauty.

The Reproachless Apartment

Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it seemed to Anthony, were the uprights of a gigantic ladder stretching from Washington Square to Central Park. Coming up-town on top of a bus toward Fifty-second Street invariably gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by hand on a series of treacherous rungs, and when the bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he found something akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps to the sidewalk.

After that, he had but to walk down Fifty-second Street half a block, pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses–and then in a jiffy he was under the high ceilings of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted, read, and entertained.

The house itself was of murky material, built in the late nineties; in response to the steadily growing need of small apartments each floor had been thoroughly remodelled and rented individually. Of the four apartments Anthony’s, on the second floor, was the most desirable.

The front room had fine high ceilings and three large windows that loomed down pleasantly upon Fifty-second Street. In its appointments it escaped by a safe margin being of any particular period; it escaped stiffness, stuffiness, bareness, and decadence. It smelt neither of smoke nor of incense–it was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep lounge of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting about it like a haze. There was a high screen of Chinese lacquer chiefly concerned with geometrical fishermen and huntsmen in black and gold; this made a corner alcove for a voluminous chair guarded by an orange-colored standing lamp. Deep in the fireplace a quartered shield was burned to a murky black.

Passing through the dining-room, which, as Anthony took only breakfast at home, was merely a magnificent potentiality, and down a comparatively long hall, one came to the heart and core of the apartment–Anthony’s bedroom and bath.

Both of them were immense. Under the ceilings of the former even the great canopied bed seemed of only average size. On the floor an exotic rug of crimson velvet was soft as fleece on his bare feet. His bathroom, in contrast to the rather portentous character of his bedroom, was gay, bright, extremely habitable and even faintly facetious. Framed around the walls were photographs of four celebrated thespian beauties of the day: Julia Sanderson as “The Sunshine Girl,” Ina Claire as “The Quaker Girl,” Billie Burke as “The Mind-the-Paint Girl,” and Hazel Dawn as “The Pink Lady.” Between Billie Burke and Hazel Dawn hung a print representing a great stretch of snow presided over by a cold and formidable sun–this, claimed Anthony, symbolized the cold shower.

The bathtub, equipped with an ingenious bookholder, was low and large. Beside it a wall wardrobe bulged with sufficient linen for three men and with a generation of neckties. There was no skimpy glorified towel of a carpet–instead, a rich rug, like the one in his bedroom a miracle of softness, that seemed almost to massage the wet foot emerging from the tub....

All in all a room to conjure with–it was easy to see that Anthony dressed there, arranged his immaculate hair there, in fact did everything but sleep and eat there. It was his pride, this bathroom. He felt that if he had a love he would have hung her picture just facing the tub so that, lost in the soothing steamings of the hot water, he might lie and look up at her and muse warmly and sensuously on her beauty.

Nor Does he Spin

The apartment was kept clean by an English servant with the singularly, almost theatrically, appropriate name of Bounds, whose technic was marred only by the fact that he wore a soft collar. Had he been entirely Anthony’s Bounds this defect would have been summarily remedied, but he was also the Bounds of two other gentlemen in the neighborhood. From eight until eleven in the morning he was entirely Anthony’s. He arrived with the mail and cooked breakfast. At nine-thirty he pulled the edge of Anthony’s blanket and spoke a few terse words–Anthony never remembered clearly what they were and rather suspected they were deprecative; then he served breakfast on a card-table in the front room, made the bed and, after asking with some hostility if there was anything else, withdrew.

In the mornings, at least once a week, Anthony went to see his broker. His income was slightly under seven thousand a year, the interest on money inherited from his mother. His grandfather, who had never allowed his own son to graduate from a very liberal allowance, judged that this sum was sufficient for young Anthony’s needs. Every Christmas he sent him a five-hundred-dollar bond, which Anthony usually sold, if possible, as he was always a little, not very, hard up.

The visits to his broker varied from semi-social chats to discussions of the safety of eight per cent investments, and Anthony always enjoyed them. The big trust company building seemed to link him definitely to the great fortunes whose solidarity he respected and to assure him that he was adequately chaperoned by the hierarchy of finance. From these hurried men he derived the same sense of safety that he had in contemplating his grandfather’s money–even more, for the latter appeared, vaguely, a demand loan made by the world to Adam Patch’s own moral righteousness, while this money down-town seemed rather to have been grasped and held by sheer indomitable strengths and tremendous feats of will; in addition, it seemed more definitely and explicitly–money.

Closely as Anthony trod on the heels of his income, he considered it to be enough. Some golden day, of course, he would have many millions; meanwhile he possessed a raison d’etrein the theoretical creation of essays on the popes of the Renaissance. This flashes back to the conversation with his grandfather immediately upon his return from Rome.

He had hoped to find his grandfather dead, but had learned by telephoning from the pier that Adam Patch was comparatively well again–the next day he had concealed his disappointment and gone out to Tarrytown. Five miles from the station his taxicab entered an elaborately groomed drive that threaded a veritable maze of walls and wire fences guarding the estate–this, said the public, was because it was definitely known that if the Socialists had their way, one of the first men they’d assassinate would be old Cross Patch.

Anthony was late and the venerable philanthropist was awaiting him in a glass-walled sun parlor, where he was glancing through the morning papers for the second time. His secretary, Edward Shuttleworth–who before his regeneration had been gambler, saloon-keeper, and general reprobate–ushered Anthony into the room, exhibiting his redeemer and benefactor as though he were displaying a treasure of immense value.

They shook hands gravely. “I’m awfully glad to hear you’re better,” Anthony said.

The senior Patch, with an air of having seen his grandson only last week, pulled out his watch.

“Train late?” he asked mildly.

It had irritated him to wait for Anthony. He was under the delusion not only that in his youth he had handled his practical affairs with the utmost scrupulousness, even to keeping every engagement on the dot, but also that this was the direct and primary cause of his success.

“It’s been late a good deal this month,” he remarked with a shade of meek accusation in his voice–and then after a long sigh, “Sit down.”

Anthony surveyed his grandfather with that tacit amazement which always attended the sight. That this feeble, unintelligent old man was possessed of such power that, yellow journals to the contrary, the men in the republic whose souls he could not have bought directly or indirectly would scarcely have populated White Plains, seemed as impossible to believe as that he had once been a pink-and-white baby.

The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows–the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the girth of arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one, suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweeked out his hairs, changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in others–callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a paintbox. Then through his body and his soul it had attacked his brain. It had sent him night-sweats and tears and unfounded dreads. It had split his intense normality into credulity and suspicion. Out of the coarse material of his enthusiasm it had cut dozens of meek but petulant obsessions; his energy was shrunk to the bad temper of a spoiled child, and for his will to power was substituted a fatuous puerile desire for a land of harps and canticles on earth.

The amenities having been gingerly touched upon, Anthony felt that he was expected to outline his intentions–and simultaneously a glimmer in the old man’s eye warned him against broaching, for the present, his desire to live abroad. He wished that Shuttleworth would have tact enough to leave the room–he detested Shuttleworth–but the secretary had settled blandly in a rocker and was dividing between the two Patches the glances of his faded eyes.

“Now that you’re here you ought to dosomething,” said his grandfather softly, “accomplish something.”

Anthony waited for him to speak of “leaving something done when you pass on.” Then he made a suggestion:

“I thought–it seemed to me that perhaps I’m best qualified to write–”

Adam Patch winced, visualizing a family poet with a long hair and three mistresses.

“–history,” finished Anthony.

“History? History of what? The Civil War? The Revolution?”

“Why–no, sir. A history of the Middle Ages.” Simultaneously an idea was born for a history of the Renaissance popes, written from some novel angle. Still, he was glad he had said “Middle Ages.”

“Middle Ages? Why not your own country? Something you know about?”

“Well, you see I’ve lived so much abroad–”

“Why you should write about the Middle Ages, I don’t know. Dark Ages, we used to call ’em. Nobody knows what happened, and nobody cares, except that they’re over now.” He continued for some minutes on the uselessness of such information, touching, naturally, on the Spanish Inquisition and the “corruption of the monasteries.” Then:

“Do you think you’ll be able to do any work in New York–or do you really intend to work at all?” This last with soft, almost imperceptible, cynicism.

“Why, yes, I do, sir.”

“When’ll you be done?”

“Well, there’ll be an outline, you see–and a lot of preliminary reading.”

“I should think you’d have done enough of that already.”

The conversation worked itself jerkily toward a rather abrupt conclusion, when Anthony rose, looked at his watch, and remarked that he had an engagement with his broker that afternoon. He had intended to stay a few days with his grandfather, but he was tired and irritated from a rough crossing, and quite unwilling to stand a subtle and sanctimonious browbeating. He would come out again in a few days, he said.

Nevertheless, it was due to this encounter that work had come into his life as a permanent idea. During the year that had passed since then, he had made several lists of authorities, he had even experimented with chapter titles and the division of his work into periods, but not one line of actual writing existed at present, or seemed likely ever to exist. He did nothing–and contrary to the most accredited copy-book logic, he managed to divert himself with more than average content.

Afternoon

It was October in 1913, midway in a week of pleasant days, with the sunshine loitering in the cross-streets and the atmosphere so languid as to seem weighted with ghostly falling leaves. It was pleasant to sit lazily by the open window finishing a chapter of “Erewhon.” It was pleasant to yawn about five, toss the book on a table, and saunter humming along the hall to his bath.

“To... you... beaut-if-ul lady,”

he was singing as he turned on the tap.

“I raise... my... eyes; To... you... beaut-if-ul la-a-dy My... heart... cries–”

He raised his voice to compete with the flood of water pouring into the tub, and as he looked at the picture of Hazel Dawn upon the wall he put an imaginary violin to his shoulder and softly caressed it with a phantom bow. Through his closed lips he made a humming noise, which he vaguely imagined resembled the sound of a violin. After a moment his hands ceased their gyrations and wandered to his shirt, which he began to unfasten. Stripped, and adopting an athletic posture like the tiger-skin man in the advertisement, he regarded himself with some satisfaction in the mirror, breaking off to dabble a tentative foot in the tub. Readjusting a faucet and indulging in a few preliminary grunts, he slid in.

Once accustomed to the temperature of the water he relaxed into a state of drowsy content. When he finished his bath he would dress leisurely and walk down Fifth Avenue to the Ritz, where he had an appointment for dinner with his two most frequent companions, Dick Caramel and Maury Noble. Afterward he and Maury were going to the theatre–Caramel would probably trot home and work on his book, which ought to be finished pretty soon.

Anthony was glad hewasn’t going to work on hisbook. The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed–the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

Emerging from his bath he polished himself with the meticulous attention of a bootblack. Then he wandered into the bedroom, and whistling the while a weird, uncertain melody, strolled here and there buttoning, adjusting, and enjoying the warmth of the thick carpet on his feet.

He lit a cigarette, tossed the match out the open top of the window, then paused in his tracks with the cigarette two inches from his mouth–which fell faintly ajar. His eyes were focussed upon a spot of brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley.

It was a girl in a red negligé, silk surely, drying her hair by the still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a sudden impression that she was beautiful. Sitting on the stone parapet beside her was a cushion the same color as her garment and she was leaning both arms upon it as she looked down into the sunny areaway, where Anthony could hear children playing.

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful–then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.

He finished his dressing, found a black bow tie and adjusted it carefully by the three-sided mirror in the bathroom. Then yielding to an impulse he walked quickly into the bedroom and again looked out the window. The woman was standing up now; she had tossed her hair back and he had a full view of her. She was fat, full thirty-five, utterly undistinguished. Making a clicking noise with his mouth he returned to the bathroom and reparted his hair.

“To... you... beaut-if-ul lady,”

he sang lightly,

“I raise... my... eyes–”

Then with a last soothing brush that left an iridescent surface of sheer gloss he left his bathroom and his apartment and walked down Fifth Avenue to the Ritz-Carlton.

Three Men

At seven Anthony and his friend Maury Noble are sitting at a corner table on the cool roof. Maury Noble is like nothing so much as a large slender and imposing cat. His eyes are narrow and full of incessant, protracted blinks. His hair is smooth and flat, as though it has been licked by a possible–and, if so, Herculean–mother-cat. During Anthony’s time at Harvard he had been considered the most unique figure in his class, the most brilliant, the most original–smart, quiet and among the saved.

This is the man whom Anthony considers his best friend. This is the only man of all his acquaintance whom he admires and, to a bigger extent than he likes to admit to himself, envies.

They are glad to see each other now–their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other’s presence, a new serenity; Maury Noble behind that fine and absurdly catlike face is all but purring. And Anthony, nervous as a will-o’-the-wisp, restless–he is at rest now.

They are engaged in one of those easy short-speech conversations that only men under thirty or men under great stress indulge in.

Anthony: Seven o’clock. Where’s the Caramel? (Impatiently.) I wish he’d finish that interminable novel. I’ve spent more time hungry–

MAURY: He’s got a new name for it. “The Demon Lover “–not bad, eh?

Anthony: (interested) “The Demon Lover”? Oh “woman wailing”–No–not a bit bad! Not bad at all–d’you think?

MAURY: Rather good. What time did you say?

Anthony: Seven.

MAURY:(His eyes narrowing–not unpleasantly, but to express a faint disapproval) Drove me crazy the other day.

Anthony: How?

MAURY: That habit of taking notes.

Anthony: Me, too. Seems I’d said something night before that he considered material but he’d forgotten it–so he had at me. He’d say “Can’t you try to concentrate?” And I’d say “You bore me to tears. How do I remember?”

(MAURY laughs noiselessly, by a sort of bland and appreciative widening of his features.)

MAURY: Dick doesn’t necessarily see more than any one else. He merely can put down a larger proportion of what he sees.

Anthony: That rather impressive talent–

MAURY: Oh, yes. Impressive!

Anthony: And energy–ambitious, well-directed energy. He’s so entertaining–he’s so tremendously stimulating and exciting. Often there’s something breathless in being with him.

MAURY: Oh, yes. (Silence, and then:)

Anthony: (With his thin, somewhat uncertain face at its most convinced) But not indomitable energy. Some day, bit by bit, it’ll blow away, and his rather impressive talent with it, and leave only a wisp of a man, fretful and egotistic and garrulous.

MAURY: (With laughter) Here we sit vowing to each other that little Dick sees less deeply into things than we do. And I’ll bet he feels a measure of superiority on his side–creative mind over merely critical mind and all that.

Anthony: Oh, yes. But he’s wrong. He’s inclined to fall for a million silly enthusiasms. If it wasn’t that he’s absorbed in realism and therefore has to adopt the garments of the cynic he’d be–he’d be credulous as a college religious leader. He’s an idealist. Oh, yes. He thinks he’s not, because he’s rejected Christianity. Remember him in college? just swallow every writer whole, one after another, ideas, technic, and characters, Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, each one as easily as the last.

MAURY:(Still considering his own last observation) I remember.

Anthony: It’s true. Natural born fetich-worshipper. Take art–

MAURY: Let’s order. He’ll be–

Anthony: Sure. Let’s order. I told him–

MAURY: Here he comes. Look–he’s going to bump that waiter. (He lifts his finger as a signal–lifts it as though it were a soft and friendly claw.) Here y’are, Caramel.

A NEW VOICE: (Fiercely) Hello, Maury. Hello, Anthony Comstock Patch. How is old Adam’s grandson? Débutantes still after you, eh?

In personRichard Caramel is short and fair–he is to be bald at thirty-five. He has yellowish eyes–one of them startlingly clear, the other opaque as a muddy pool–and a bulging brow like a funny-paper baby. He bulges in other places–his paunch bulges, prophetically, his words have an air of bulging from his mouth, even his dinner coat pockets bulge, as though from contamination, with a dog-eared collection of time-tables, programmes, and miscellaneous scraps–on these he takes his notes with great screwings up of his unmatched yellow eyes and motions of silence with his disengaged left hand.

When he reaches the table he shakes hands with Anthony and MAURY. He is one of those men who invariably shake hands, even with people whom they have seen an hour before.

Anthony: Hello, Caramel. Glad you’re here. We needed a comic relief.

MAURY: You’re late. Been racing the postman down the block? We’ve been clawing over your character.

DICK: (FixingAnthony eagerly with the bright eye) What’d you say? Tell me and I’ll write it down. Cut three thousand words out of Part One this afternoon.

MAURY: Noble aesthete. And I poured alcohol into my stomach.

DICK: I don’t doubt it. I bet you two have been sitting here for an hour talking about liquor.

Anthony: We never pass out, my beardless boy.

MAURY: We never go home with ladies we meet when we’re lit.

Anthony: All in our parties are characterized by a certain haughty distinction.

DICK: The particularly silly sort who boast about being “tanks”! Trouble is you’re both in the eighteenth century. School of the Old English Squire. Drink quietly until you roll under the table. Never have a good time. Oh, no, that isn’t done at all.

Anthony: This from Chapter Six, I’ll bet.

DICK: Going to the theatre?

MAURY: Yes. We intend to spend the evening doing some deep thinking over of life’s problems. The thing is tersely called “The Woman.” I presume that she will “pay.”

Anthony: My God! Is that what it is? Let’s go to the Follies again.

MAURY: I’m tired of it. I’ve seen it three times. (To DICK:) The first time, we went out after Act One and found a most amazing bar. When we came back we entered the wrong theatre.

Anthony: Had a protracted dispute with a scared young couple we thought were in our seats.

DICK: (As though talking to himself) I think–that when I’ve done another novel and a play, and maybe a book of short stories, I’ll do a musical comedy.

MAURY: I know–with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And all the critics will groan and grunt about “Dear old Pinafore.” And I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

DICK: (Pompously) Art isn’t meaningless.

MAURY: It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.

Anthony: In other words, Dick, you’re playing before a grand stand peopled with ghosts.

MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.

Anthony:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I’d feel that it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.

DICK: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want every one to accept that sophistic rot?

Anthony: Yeah, I suppose so.

MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one in America but a selected thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of morals–Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don’t complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.

(Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have gone on to say is lost for all time.)

Night

Afterward they visited a ticket speculator and, at a price, obtained seats for a new musical comedy called “High Jinks.” In the foyer of the theatre they waited a few moments to see the first-night crowd come in. There were opera cloaks stitched of myriad, many-colored silks and furs; there were jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips of white and rose; there were innumerable broad shimmers down the middles of innumerable silk hats; there were shoes of gold and bronze and red and shining black; there were the high-piled, tight-packed coiffures of many women and the slick, watered hair of well-kept men–most of all there was the ebbing, flowing, chattering, chuckling, foaming, slow-rolling wave effect of this cheerful sea of people as to-night it poured its glittering torrent into the artificial lake of laughter....

After the play they parted–Maury was going to a dance at Sherry’s, Anthony homeward and to bed.

He found his way slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times Square, which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin–too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully, swallowing into his lungs perfume and the not unpleasant scent of many cigarettes. He caught the glance of a dark young beauty sitting alone in a closed taxicab. Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.

Two young Jewish men passed him, talking in loud voices and craning their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances. They were dressed in suits of the exaggerated tightness then semi-fashionable; their turned over collars were notched at the Adam’s apple; they wore gray spats and carried gray gloves on their cane handles.

Passed a bewildered old lady borne along like a basket of eggs between two men who exclaimed to her of the wonders of Times Square–explained them so quickly that the old lady, trying to be impartially interested, waved her head here and there like a piece of wind-worried old orange-peel. Anthony heard a snatch of their conversation:

“There’s the Astor, mama!”

“Look! See the chariot race sign–”

“There’s where we were to-day. No, there!”

“Good gracious!... “

“You should worry and grow thin like a dime.” He recognized the current witticism of the year as it issued stridently from one of the pairs at his elbow.

“And I says to him, I says–”

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath–and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light–light dividing like pearls–forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.

He turned thankfully down the hush that blew like a dark wind out of a cross-street, passed a bakery-restaurant in whose windows a dozen roast chickens turned over and over on an automatic spit. From the door came a smell that was hot, doughy, and pink. A drug-store next, exhaling medicines, spilt soda water and a pleasant undertone from the cosmetic counter; then a Chinese laundry, still open, steamy and stifling, smelling folded and vaguely yellow. All these depressed him; reaching Sixth Avenue he stopped at a corner cigar store and emerged feeling better–the cigar store was cheerful, humanity in a navy blue mist, buying a luxury....

Once in his apartment he smoked a last cigarette, sitting in the dark by his open front window. For the first time in over a year he found himself thoroughly enjoying New York. There was a rare pungency in it certainly, a quality almost Southern. A lonesome town, though. He who had grown up alone had lately learned to avoid solitude. During the past several months he had been careful, when he had no engagement for the evening, to hurry to one of his clubs and find some one. Oh, there was a loneliness here–

His cigarette, its smoke bordering the thin folds of curtain with rims of faint white spray, glowed on until the clock in St. Anne’s down the street struck one with a querulous fashionable beauty. The elevated, half a quiet block away, sounded a rumble of drums–and should he lean from his window he would see the train, like an angry eagle, breasting the dark curve at the corner. He was reminded of a fantastic romance he had lately read in which cities had been bombed from aerial trains, and for a moment he fancied that Washington Square had declared war on Central Park and that this was a north-bound menace loaded with battle and sudden death. But as it passed the illusion faded; it diminished to the faintest of drums–then to a far-away droning eagle.

There were the bells and the continued low blur of auto horns from Fifth Avenue, but his own street was silent and he was safe in here from all the threat of life, for there was his door and the long hall and his guardian bedroom–safe, safe! The arc-light shining into his window seemed for this hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful than the moon.

A Flash-Back in Paradise

Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a breathless hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately as they went by and the winds made a soft incessant flurry in her hair. She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one–the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.

It became known to her, at length, that she was to be born again. Sighing, she began a long conversation with a voice that was in the white wind, a conversation that took many hours and of which I can give only a fragment here.

BEAUTY: (Her lips scarcely stirring, her eyes turned, as always, inward upon herself) Whither shall I journey now?

THE VOICE: To a new country–a land you have never seen before.

BEAUTY: (Petulantly) I loathe breaking into these new civilizations. How long a stay this time?

THE VOICE: Fifteen years.

BEAUTY: And what’s the name of the place?

THE VOICE: It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth–a land whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men–

BEAUTY: (In astonishment) What?

THE VOICE: (Very much depressed) Yes, it is truly a melancholy spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in broad daylight saying “Do this!” and “Do that!” and all the men, even those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women to whom they refer sonorously either as “Mrs. So-and-so” or as “the wife.”

BEAUTY: But this can’t be true! I can understand, of course, their obedience to women of charm–but to fat women? to bony women? to women with scrawny cheeks?

THE VOICE: Even so.

BEAUTY: What of me? What chance shall I have?

THE VOICE: It will be “harder going,” if I may borrow a phrase.

BEAUTY: (After a dissatisfied pause) Why not the old lands, the land of grapes and soft-tongued men or the land of ships and seas?

THE VOICE: It’s expected that they’ll be very busy shortly.

BEAUTY: Oh!

THE VOICE: Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

BEAUTY: What will I be? Tell me?

THE VOICE: At first it was thought that you would go this time as an actress in the motion pictures but, after all, it’s not advisable. You will be disguised during your fifteen years as what is called a “susciety gurl.”

BEAUTY: What’s that?

(There is a new sound in the wind which must for our purposes be interpreted asTHE VOICE scratching its head.)

THE VOICE: (At length) It’s a sort of bogus aristocrat.

BEAUTY: Bogus? What is bogus?

THE VOICE: That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much that is bogus. Also, you will do much that is bogus.

BEAUTY: (Placidly) It all sounds so vulgar.

THE VOICE: Not half as vulgar as it is. You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you danced the old ones.

BEAUTY: (In a whisper) Will I be paid?

THE VOICE: Yes, as usual–in love.

BEAUTY: (With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the immobility of her lips) And will I like being called a jazz-baby?

THE VOICE: (Soberly) You will love it....

(The dialogue ends here, withBEAUTY still sitting quietly, the stars pausing in an ecstasy of appreciation, the wind, white and gusty, blowing through her hair.

All this took place seven years beforeAnthony sat by the front windows of his apartment and listened to the chimes of St. Anne’s.)

Chapter II

Portrait of a Siren

Crispness folded down upon New York a month later, bringing November and the three big football games and a great fluttering of furs along Fifth Avenue. It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and suppressed excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony’s mail. Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition a tremendous undaunted ambition toward the first three dozen young men, who were of course invited to each of the ninety-six parties–as were the young lady’s group of family friends, acquaintances, college boys, and eager young outsiders. To continue, there was a third layer from the skirts of the city, from Newark and the Jersey suburbs up to bitter Connecticut and the ineligible sections of Long Island–and doubtless contiguous layers down to the city’s shoes: Jewesses were coming out into a society of Jewish men and women, from Riverside to the Bronx, and looking forward to a rising young broker or jeweller and a kosher wedding; Irish girls were casting their eyes, with license at last to do so, upon a society of young Tammany politicians, pious undertakers, and grown-up choirboys.

And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air of entré–the working girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted male–as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke and the subway’s foulness was freshened. And the actresses came out in new plays and the publishers came out with new books and the Castles came out with new dances. And the railroads came out with new schedules containing new mistakes instead of the old ones that the commuters had grown used to....

The City was coming out!

Anthony, walking along Forty-second Street one afternoon under a steel-gray sky, ran unexpectedly into Richard Caramel emerging from the Manhattan Hotel barber shop. It was a cold day, the first definitely cold day, and Caramel had on one of those knee-length, sheep-lined coats long worn by the working men of the Middle West, that were just coming into fashionable approval. His soft hat was of a discreet dark brown, and from under it his clear eye flamed like a topaz. He stopped Anthony enthusiastically, slapping him on the arms more from a desire to keep himself warm than from playfulness, and, after his inevitable hand shake, exploded into sound.

“Cold as the devil–Good Lord, I’ve been working like the deuce all day till my room got so cold I thought I’d get pneumonia. Darn landlady economizing on coal came up when I yelled over the stairs for her for half an hour. Began explaining why and all. God! First she drove me crazy, then I began to think she was sort of a character, and took notes while she talked–so she couldn’t see me, you know, just as though I were writing casually–”

He had seized Anthony’s arm and walking him briskly up Madison Avenue.

“Where to?”

“Nowhere in particular.”

“Well, then what’s the use?” demanded Anthony.

They stopped and stared at each other, and Anthony wondered if the cold made his own face as repellent as Dick Caramel’s, whose nose was crimson, whose bulging brow was blue, whose yellow unmatched eyes were red and watery at the rims. After a moment they began walking again.

“Done some good work on my novel.” Dick was looking and talking emphatically at the sidewalk. “But I have to get out once in a while.” He glanced at Anthony apologetically, as though craving encouragement.

“I have to talk. I guess very few people ever really think, I mean sit down and ponder and have ideas in sequence. I do my thinking in writing or conversation. You’ve got to have a start, sort of–something to defend or contradict–don’t you think?”

Anthony grunted and withdrew his arm gently.

“I don’t mind carrying you, Dick, but with that coat–”

“I mean,” continued Richard Caramel gravely, “that on paper your first paragraph contains the idea you’re going to damn or enlarge on. In conversation you’ve got your vis-à-vis’s last statement–but when you simply ponder, why, your ideas just succeed each other like magic-lantern pictures and each one forces out the last.”

They passed Forty-fifth Street and slowed down slightly. Both of them lit cigarettes and blew tremendous clouds of smoke and frosted breath into the air.

“Let’s walk up to the Plaza and have an egg-nog,” suggested Anthony. “Do you good. Air’ll get the rotten nicotine out of your lungs. Come on–I’ll let you talk about your book all the way.”

“I don’t want to if it bores you. I mean you needn’t do it as a favor.” The words tumbled out in haste, and though he tried to keep his face casual it screwed up uncertainly. Anthony was compelled to protest: “Bore me? I should say not!”

“Got a cousin–” began Dick, but Anthony interrupted by stretching out his arms and breathing forth a low cry of exultation.

“Good weather!” he exclaimed, “isn’t it? Makes me feel about ten. I mean it makes me feel as I should have felt when I was ten. Murderous! Oh, God! one minute it’s my world, and the next I’m the world’s fool. To-day it’s my world and everything’s easy, easy. Even Nothing is easy!”

“Got a cousin up at the Plaza. Famous girl. We can go up and meet her. She lives there in the winter–has lately anyway–with her mother and father.”

“Didn’t know you had cousins in New York.”

“Her name’s Gloria. She’s from home–Kansas City. Her mother’s a practising Bilphist, and her father’s quite dull but a perfect gentleman.”

“What are they? Literary material?”

“They try to be. All the old man does is tell me he just met the most wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic friend of his and then he says: “There"s a character for you! Why don’t you write him up? Everybody’d be interested in him.’ Or else he tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and says: “Why don’t you write a story about that place? That’d be a wonderful setting for a story!’”

“How about the girl?” inquired Anthony casually, “Gloria–Gloria what?”

“Gilbert. Oh, you’ve heard of her–Gloria Gilbert. Goes to dances at colleges–all that sort of thing.”

“I’ve heard her name.”

“Good-looking–in fact damned attractive.”

They reached Fiftieth Street and turned over toward the Avenue.

“I don’t care for young girls as a rule,” said Anthony, frowning.

This was not strictly true. While it seemed to him that the average debutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any girl who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him enormously.

“Gloria’s darn nice–not a brain in her head.”

Anthony laughed in a one-syllabled snort.

“By that you mean that she hasn’t a line of literary patter.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Dick, you know what passes as brains in a girl for you. Earnest young women who sit with you in a corner and talk earnestly about life. The kind who when they were sixteen argued with grave faces as to whether kissing was right or wrong–and whether it was immoral for freshmen to drink beer.”

Richard Caramel was offended. His scowl crinkled like crushed paper.

“No–” he began, but Anthony interrupted ruthlessly.

“Oh, yes; kind who just at present sit in corners and confer on the latest Scandinavian Dante available in English translation.”

Dick turned to him, a curious falling in his whole countenance. His question was almost an appeal.

“What’s the matter with you and Maury? You talk sometimes as though I were a sort of inferior.”

Anthony was confused, but he was also cold and a little uncomfortable, so he took refuge in attack.

“I don’t think your brains matter, Dick.”

“Of course they matter!” exclaimed Dick angrily. “What do you mean? Why don’t they matter?”

“You might know too much for your pen.”

“I couldn’t possibly.”

“I can imagine,” insisted Anthony, “a man knowing too much for his talent to express. Like me. Suppose, for instance, I have more wisdom than you, and less talent. It would tend to make me inarticulate. You, on the contrary, have enough water to fill the pail and a big enough pail to hold the water.”

“I don’t follow you at all,” complained Dick in a crestfallen tone. Infinitely dismayed, he seemed to bulge in protest. He was staring intently at Anthony and caroming off a succession of passers-by, who reproached him with fierce, resentful glances.

“I simply mean that a talent like Wells’s could carry the intelligence of a Spencer. But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it’s carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.”

Dick considered, unable to decide the exact degree of criticism intended by Anthony’s remarks. But Anthony, with that facility which seemed so frequently to flow from him, continued, his dark eyes gleaming in his thin face, his chin raised, his voice raised, his whole physical being raised:

“Say I am proud and sane and wise–an Athenian among Greeks. Well, I might fail where a lesser man would succeed. He could imitate, he could adorn, he could be enthusiastic, he could be hopefully constructive. But this hypothetical me would be too proud to imitate, too sane to be enthusiastic, too sophisticated to be Utopian, too Grecian to adorn.”

“Then you don’t think the artist works from his intelligence?”

“No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because it’s his mode of living. Don’t tell me you like this “Divine Function of the Artist’ business?”

“I’m not accustomed even to refer to myself as an artist.”

“Dick,” said Anthony, changing his tone, “I want to beg your pardon.”

“Why?”

“For that outburst. I’m honestly sorry. I was talking for effect.”

Somewhat mollified, Dick rejoined:

“I’ve often said you were a Philistine at heart.”

It was a crackling dusk when they turned in under the white façade of the Plaza and tasted slowly the foam and yellow thickness of an egg-nog. Anthony looked at his companion. Richard Caramel’s nose and brow were slowly approaching a like pigmentation; the red was leaving the one, the blue deserting the other. Glancing in a mirror, Anthony was glad to find that his own skin had not discolored. On the contrary, a faint glow had kindled in his cheeks–he fancied that he had never looked so well.

“Enough for me,” said Dick, his tone that of an athlete in training. “I want to go up and see the Gilberts. Won’t you come?”

“Why–yes. If you don’t dedicate me to the parents and dash off in the corner with Dora.”

“Not Dora–Gloria.”

A clerk announced them over the phone, and ascending to the tenth floor they followed a winding corridor and knocked at 1088. The door was answered by a middle-aged lady–Mrs. Gilbert herself.

“How do you do?” She spoke in the conventional American lady-lady language. “Well, I’m aw_fully glad to see you–”

Hasty interjections by Dick, and then:

“Mr. Pats? Well, do come in, and leave your coat there.” She pointed to a chair and changed her inflection to a deprecatory laugh full of minute gasps. “This is really lovely–lovely. Why, Richard, you haven’t been here for solong–no!–no!” The latter monosyllables served half as responses, half as periods, to some vague starts from Dick. “Well, do sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing.”

One crossed and recrossed; one stood and bowed ever so gently; one smiled again and again with helpless stupidity; one wondered if she would ever sit down at length one slid thankfully into a chair and settled for a pleasant call.

“I suppose it’s because you’ve been busy–as much as anything else,” smiled Mrs. Gilbert somewhat ambiguously. The “as much as anything else” she used to balance all her more rickety sentences. She had two other ones: “at least that’s the way I look at it” and “pure and simple”–these three, alternated, gave each of her remarks an air of being a general reflection on life, as though she had calculated all causes and, at length, put her finger on the ultimate one.

Richard Caramel’s face, Anthony saw, was now quite normal. The brow and cheeks were of a flesh color, the nose politely inconspicuous. He had fixed his aunt with the bright-yellow eye, giving her that acute and exaggerated attention that young males are accustomed to render to all females who are of no further value.

“Are you a writer too, Mr. Pats?... Well, perhaps we can all bask in Richard’s fame.”–Gentle laughter led by Mrs. Gilbert.

“Gloria’s out,” she said, with an air of laying down an axiom from which she would proceed to derive results. “She’s dancing somewhere. Gloria goes, goes, goes. I tell her I don’t see how she stands it. She dances all afternoon and all night, until I think she’s going to wear herself to a shadow. Her father is very worried about her.”

She smiled from one to the other. They both smiled.

She was composed, Anthony perceived, of a succession of semicircles and parabolas, like those figures that gifted folk make on the typewriter: head, arms, bust, hips, thighs, and ankles were in a bewildering tier of roundnesses. Well ordered and clean she was, with hair of an artificially rich gray; her large face sheltered weather-beaten blue eyes and was adorned with just the faintest white mustache.

“I always say,” she remarked to Anthony, “that Richard is an ancient soul.”

In the tense pause that followed, Anthony considered a pun–something about Dick having been much walked upon.

“We all have souls of different ages,” continued Mrs. Gilbert radiantly; “at least that’s what I say.”