Chapter three of The Great catsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. There was music
from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens, men
and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the
stars. At high tide in the afternoon, I watched his guests diving from
the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of
his beach, while his two motor boats slit the waters of the sound,
drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends, his rolls Royce became an
omnibus bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long
past midnight, while his station wagons scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet
all trains. And on Mondays, eight servants, including an extra gardener,
toiled all day with mops and scrubbing brushes and hammers and garden shears, repairing
the ravages of the night before. Every Friday, five crates of oranges and
lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York. Every Monday, these same oranges
and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was
a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in
half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's
thumb. At least once a fortnight, a corps of caterers came down with
several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of
Gatsby's enormous garden on buffet tables garnished with glistening ord'ruve, spiced baked hams,
crowded against salads of Harlequin designs, and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a
dark gold. In the main hall, a bar with a real brass rail
was set up and stocked with jins and liquors, and with cordials so long
forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o'clock, the orchestra has arrived, no thin five piece affair,
but a whole pitiful of oboes and trombones and sack the phones and violas,
and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have
come in from the beach, now and are dressing upstairs. The cars from
New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and
salons and verandahs are gaudy, with primary colors and hair bobbed in strange new
ways and shawls. Beyond the dreams of Castile, the bar is in full
swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air
is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo, and introductions forgotten on the
spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. The
lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the
orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key
higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, Spilled with prodigality, tipped out
at a cheerful word, the group change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals,
dissolve and form in the same breath. Already there are wanderers, confiding
girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for
a sharp, joyous moment, the center of a group, and then excited
with triumph glide on through the sea, change of faces and voices and color
under the constantly changing light. Suddenly, one of these gypsies and trembling Opal
seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps and down for courage, and
moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform a momentary
hush. The orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is
a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Guilda Gray's
understudy from the follies. The party has begun. I believe that on the
first night I went to Gatsby's house, I was one of the few guests
who had actually been invited. People were not invited. They went there,
They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they
ended up at Gadsby's door. Once there, they were introduced by somebody who
knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior
associated with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby
at all. Came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its
own ticket of admission. I had been actually invited. A chauffeur and uniform
of Robin's egg Blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal
note from his employer. The honor would be entirely Gatsbys, It said,
if I would attend his little party that night. He had seen me several
times and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination
of circumstances had prevented it. Signed J. Gadsby in a majestic hand.
Dressed up in white flannels, I went over to his lawn a little after
or seven and wandered around, rather ill at ease, among swirls and eddies
of people I didn't know. Though here and there was a face I had
noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young
Englishmen dotted about, all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and
all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was
sure that they were selling something bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at
least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity, and convinced that it
was theirs for a few words in the right key. As soon as I
arrived, I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or
three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed
way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in
the direction of the cocktail table, the only place in the garden where a
single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone. I was on my way
to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house
and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little backward and
looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden. Welcome or not. I found
it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks
to the passer by. Hello, I roared, advancing toward her. My
voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden. I thought you might be here,
she responded absently. As I came up, I remembered you lived next door
to She held my hand impersonally as a promise that she'd take care of me
in a minute, and gave ear to two girls and twin yellow dresses,
who stopped at the foot of the steps. Hello, they cried together.
Sorry you didn't win. That was for the golf tournament she had lost in
the finals the week before. You don't know who we are, said one
of the girls in yellow. But we met you here about a month ago.
You've dyed your hair since then, remarked Jordan, and I started,
but the girls had moved casually on, and her remark was addressed to the
premature moon produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's basket.
With Jordan's slender, golden arm resting on mine, we descended the steps
and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the
twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow
and three men, each one introduced to us as mister mumble. Do you
come to these parties? Often, inquired Jordan of the girl beside her.
The last one was the one I met you at, answered the girl in
an alert, confident voice. She turned to her companion. Wasn't it for
you, Lucille? It was for Lucille too. I like to come,
Lucille said, I never care what I do, so long as I always
have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on
a chair and he asked me my name. In the inside of a week,
I got a package from Cruriers with a new evening gown in it.
Did you keep it, asked Jordan. Sure I did. I was going
to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had
to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and
sixty five dollars. There's something funny about a fellow to do a thing like
that, said the other girl eagerly. He doesn't want any trouble with anybody
who doesn't, I inquired Gatsby. Somebody told me. The two girls and
Jordan leaned together confidentially. Somebody told me they thought he killed a man.
Once a thrill passed over all of us. The three mister mumbles bent forward
and listened eagerly. I don't think it's so much that, argued the seal
skeptically. It's more that he was a German spy during the war. One
of the men nodded in confirmation. I heard that from a man who knew
all about him, grew up with him in Germany, he assured us positively.
Oh no, said the first girl. It couldn't be that, because
he was in the American Army during the war. As our credulity switched back
to her, she leaned forward with enthusiasm. You look at him sometimes when
he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man. She
narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around
for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were
whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper
about in this world. The first supper there would be another one after midnight
was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party,
who were spread around the table on the other side of the garden. There
were three married couples in Jordan's escort. A persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo,
and obviously under the impression that sooner or lay Jordan was going to yield
him up her person to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling,
this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity and assumed to itself the function of representing
the staid nobility of the countryside East Egg, condescending to West Egg, and
carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gaiety. Let's get out, whispered Jordan,
after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half hour. This is much too polite for
me. We got up, and she explained that we were going to find
the host. I had never met him, she said, and it was
making me uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way. The
bar where we glanced first was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She
couldn't find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on the
verandah. On a chance, we tried an important looking door and walked into
a high Gothic library, paneled with carved English oak and probably transported complete from
some ruin overseas. A stout, middle aged man with enormous allied spectacles was
sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with uneasy concentration
at the shelves of books. As we entered, he wheeled excitedly around and
examined Jordan from head to foot. What do you think, he demanded,
impetuously, about what. He waved his hand toward the bookshelves. About that,
as a matter of fact, you'd needn't bother to ascertain. I ascertained.
They're real, the books, he nodded, Absolutely real, have pages
and everything. I thought they'd be a nice, durable cardboard. Matter of
fact, they're absolutely real pages. And here let me show you taking our
skepticism for granted. He rushed to the bookcase and returned with volume one of
the Stoddard lectures. See, he cried triumphantly. It's a bona fide piece
of printed matter. It fooled me. This fellow's a regular Blasco. It's
a triumph what thoroughness, what realism? Knew when to stop? Two?
Didn't cut the pages? But what do you want? What do you expect?
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf,
muttering that if one brick was removed, the whole library was liable to collapse.
Who brought you, he demanded, or did you just come? I
was brought Most people were brought. Jordan looked at him alertly cheerfully, without
answering. I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt. He continued, Missus
Claude Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night.
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober
me up to sit in a library. Has it a little bit? I
think? I can't tell you. I've only been here an hour. Did
I tell you about the books? They're real? There, you told us.
We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors. There was dancing
now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing young girls backwards into
eternal, graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping
in the corners, and a great number of single girls dancing individually or relieving
the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps.
By midnight, the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung an Italian
and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were
doing stunts all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose
towards the summer sky. A pair of stage twins who turned out to be
the Girls in Yellow, did a baby act in costume, and champagne was
served in glasses bigger than finger bowls. The moon had risen higher, and
floating in the sound was a triangle of silver scales trembling a little to the
stiff, tinny drops of the banjos on the lawn. I was still with
Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my
age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable
laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of
champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental,
and profound. At a lull in the entertainment, the man looked at
me and smiled. Your face is familiar, he said, politely. Were
you in the first Division during the war. Why, yes, I was
in the twenty eighth Infantry. I was in the sixteenth until June nineteen eighteen.
I knew I'd seen you somewhere before. We talked for a moment about
some wet, gray little villages in France. Evidently he lived in the vicinity,
for he told me that he had just bought a hydroplane and was going
to try it out in the morning. I want to go with me Old
Sport, just near the shore along the sound. What time, man,
any time that suits you best. It was on the tip of my tongue
to ask his name, when Jordan looked around and smiled. Having a gay
time now, she inquired much better. I turned again to my new acquaintance.
This is an unusual party for me. I haven't even seen the host.
I live over there. I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in
the distance, and this man gats Me sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.
For a moment. He looked at me as if he failed to understand
I'm Gatsby. He said suddenly what I exclaimed? Oh, I beg your
pardon. I thought you knew Old Sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very
good host. He smiled understandingly, much more than understandingly. It was one
of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may
come across four or five times in life. It faced or seemed to face
the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an
irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted
to be understood, believed in you as you would like to be believed in
yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that at
your best you hope to convey precisely. At that point it vanished, and
I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty,
whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Sometime before he introduced
himself, I got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
Almost at the moment when mister Gatsby identified himself, a butler hurried toward
him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire, he excused
himself with a small bow and included each of us in turn. If you
want anything, just ask for an old sport, he urged me. Excuse
me, I will rejoin you later. When he was gone, I turned
immediately to Jordan, constrained to assure her of my surprise. I had expected
that mister Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years.
Who is he, I demanded, Do you know? He's just a man
named Gatsby. Where's he from? I mean? And what does he do?
Now you're started on the subject, she answered with a wan smile,
Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man. A dim background
started to take shape behind me, but at her next remark it faded away.
However, I don't believe it. Why not, I don't know,
she insisted, I just don't think he went there. Something in her tone
reminded me of the other girls. I think he killed a man and had
the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information
that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the Lower East Side of
New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn't, at least in
my provincial inexperience, I believed they didn't drift coolly out of nowhere and buy
a place on Long Island Sound. Anyhow, he gives large parties, said
Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete, and I
like large parties. They're so intimate at small parties, there isn't any privacy.
There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the
orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolala of the garden. Ladies and gentlemen.
He cried, at the request of mister Gatsby, we are going to
play for you. Mister Vladimir Tostov's latest work, which attracted so much attention
at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers, you know there
was a big sensation. He smiled with jovial condescension and added some sensation,
whereupon everybody laughed. The piece is known, he concluded lustily, as Vladimir
Tostov's Jazz History of the World. The nature of mister Tostov's composition eluded me,
because just as it began, my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone
on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes.
His tan skin was drawn attractively tight on his face, and his short hair
looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about
him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set
him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more
correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the jazz history of the World Old
was over, girls were putting their hands on men's shoulders in a puppyish convivial
way. Girls were swooning backwards playfully into men's arms, even into groups,
knowing that someone would arrest their falls. But no one swooned backwards on Gatsby,
and no French bob touched Gatsby's shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed
with Gatsby's head for the link. I beg your pardon. Gatsby's butler was
suddenly standing beside us, Miss Baker. He inquired, I beg your pardon,
but mister Gatsby would like to speak to you alone with me, She
exclaimed in surprise, Yes, madame. She got up slowly and raised her
eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed the butler toward the house. I
noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses like sports clothes.
There was a jauntiness about her movements, as if she had first learned to
walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings. I was alone, and
it was almost two. For some time, confused and intriguing sounds had issued
from a long, many windowed room which overhung the terrace, eluding Jordan's undergraduate,
who was now engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and
who implored me to join him. I went inside. The large room was
full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano,
and beside her stood a tall red haired young lady from a famous chorus,
engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the
course of her song she had decided ineptly that everything was very, very sad.
She was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was
a pause in the song, she filled it with gasping, broken sobs,
and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed
down her cheeks. Not freely, however, for when they came into contact
with her heavily beaded eyelashes, they assumed an inky color and pursued the rest
of their way in slow, black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that
she, seeing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands,
sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinuous sleep.
She had a fight with a man who says he's the husband, explained a
girl at my elbow. I looked around. Most of the remaining women were
now having fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan's party,
the quartet from East Egg were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men
was talking with curious intensity to a young actress and his wife. After attempting
to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely
and resorted to flank attacks at intervals. She appeared suddenly at his side like
an angry diamond, and hissed you promised into his ear. The reluctance to
go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at present occupied
by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing
with each other and slightly raised voices. Whenever he sees I'm having a good
time, he wants to go home. Never heard of anything so selfish in
my life. We're always the first ones to leave. Sally are well.
We're almost one of the last tonight, said one of the men, sheepishly.
The orchestra left half an hour ago, in spite of the wives agreement
that such malevolence was beyond credibility. The dispute ended in a short struggle,
and both wives were lifted kicking into the night. As I waited for my
hat in the hall, the door of the library opened and Jordan, Baker
and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to her,
but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as several people approached him
to say goodbye. Jordan's party were calling impatiently to her from the porch,
but she lingered for a moment to shake hands. I've just learned the most
amazing thing, she whispered. How long were we in there? Why?
About an hour? It was simply amazing, she repeated abstractedly. But I
swore I wouldn't tell it, And here I am tantalizing you, she yawned,
gracefully, in my face. Please come and see me phone book under
the name of missus Sigourney Howard, my aunt. She was hurrying off as
she talked her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party
at the door. Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so
late, I enjoyed the last of Gasby's guests, who were clustered around him.
I wanted to explain that I had hunted for him early in the evening,
and to apologize for not having known him in the garden. Don't mention
it, joined me eagerly. Don't give it another thought, old Sport.
The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder.
And don't forget. We're going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning at nine
o'clock. Then the butler behind his shoulder, Philadelphia. Once you own the
phone, suh, all right, in a minute, tell them I'll be
right there. Good Night, good night, good night, he smiled,
And suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last
to go, as if he had desired it all the time. Good Night,
old Sport, good night. But as I walked down the steps,
I saw that the evening was not quite over fifty feet from the door,
A dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene in the ditch beside the road.
Right side up but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coop
which had left Gatsby's drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of the
wall accounted for the detachment of the wheel, which was now getting considerable attention
from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they left their cars blocking
the road, a harsh, discordant din from those in the rear had been
audible for some time and added to the already violent confusion of the scene.
A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in
the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire, and
from the tire to the observers in a pleasant puzzled way. See, he
explained it when in the ditch. The fact was infinitely astonishing to him,
and I recognized first the unusual quality of wonder, and then the man.
It was, the late patron of Gatsby's library. How did it happen?
He shrugged his shoulders. I know nothing whatever about mechanics, he said,
decisively, But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall.
Don't ask me, said Allies, washing his hands of the whole matter.
I know very little about driving, next to nothing. It happened, that's
all I know. Well, if you're a poor driver, you ought to
be driving at night. But I wasn't even trying, he explained indignantly.
I wasn't even trying. An odd hush fell upon the bystanders. Do you
want to commit suicide? You're lucky. It was just a wheel, a
bad driver, not even trying. You don't understand, explained the criminal.
I wasn't driving. There's another man in the car. The shock that followed
this declaration found voice in a sustained ah. As the door of the coop
swung slowly open, the crowd it was now a crowd, stepped back involuntarily,
and when the door had opened wide, there was a ghostly pause.
Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale, dangling individual stepped
out of the wreck, pawed tentatively at the ground with a large, uncertain
dancing shoe. Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant
groaning of the horns, the apparition stood swaying for a moment before he perceived
the man in the duster was mother. He inquired, calmly, did we
right out of a guess? Look? Half a dozen fingers pointed at the
amputated wheel. He stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward,
as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. It came
off, someone explained, He nodded at first, I didn't know this.
We'd stopped a pause, then taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders.
Who remarked and had determined voice, What IFFF tell me where there's a gas
lead? Stay? Should at least a dozen men, some of them a
little better off than he was, explained to him that wheel and car were
no longer joined by any physical bond. Back out, he suggested. After
a moment, put her in reverse, but the wheels off. He hesitated,
though harbored. Try egg, he said. The caterwalling horns had reached
a crescendo, and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home.
I glanced back once a wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house,
making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of
his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows
and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host,
who stood on the porch, his hand up in the formal gesture of farewell.
Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given
the impression that the events of three nights, several weeks apart, were all
that absorbed me. On the contrary, there were merely casual events in a
crowded summer, and until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my
personal affairs. Most of the time I worked in the early morning, the
sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of Lower New
York to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond salesmen
by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on
little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair
with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department,
But her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went
on her vacation, in July, I let it blow quietly away. I
took dinner, usually at the Yale Club. For some reason, it was
the gloomiest event of my day, and then I went upstairs to the library
and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few
rioters around, but they never came into the library, so it was a
good place to work. After that, if the night was mellow, I
strolled down Madison Avenue, past the old murray Hill Hotel, and over thirty
third Street to the Pennsylvania Station. I began to like New York, the
racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant
flicker of men and women in machines gives to the restless eye. I like
to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine
that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives and no
one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed
them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and
smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At
the enchanted Metropolitan twilight. I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it
in others, poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows, waiting until
it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner. Young clerks in the dusk,
wasting the most poignant moments of night in life. Again, at eight o'clock,
when the dark lanes of the forties were lying five deep with throbbing taxi
cabs bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart.
Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and
there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside,
imagining that I too was hurrying towards gayety and sharing their intimate excitement. I
wished them well. For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and
then in midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go
places with her because she was a golf champion and everyone knew her name.
Then it was something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt
a sort of tender curiosity. The bored, haughty face that she turned to
the world concealed something most affectations concealed something eventually, even though they don't in
the beginning, And one day I found what it was. When we were
on a house party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out
in the rain with the top down and then lied about it. And suddenly
I remembered the story about her that had eluded me. That night at Daisy's,
at her first big golf tournament, there was a row that nearly reached
the newspapers, a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie
in the semi final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal,
then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness
admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained
together in my mind. Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and
now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any
divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She
wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness, I
supposed she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young. In order
to keep that cool, insolent smile, turned to the world and yet satisfied
the demands of her hard, jaunty body. It made no difference to me.
Dishonesty and a woman is a thing you never blame deeply. I was
casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party
that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started out because
she passed so close to some workman that our fender flicked a button on the
man's coat. You're a rotten driver, I protested. Either you want to
be more careful, or you wanted to drive at all. I am careful.
No, you're or not? Well, other people are, she said
lightly. Well, what's that got to do with it? They'll keep out
of my way, She insisted, it takes two to make an accident.
Suppose you meant somebody just as careless as yourself. I hope I never will,
she answered, I hate careless people. That's why I like you.
Her gray, sunstrained eyes stared straight ahead. But she had deliberately shifted our
relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her, But I am
slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as breaks on my desires,
and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle.
Back home, I've been writing letters once a week and signing them Love
Nick, and all I could think of was how when that certain girl played
tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless,
there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was
free. Every One suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues,
and this is mine. I am one of the few honest people that I
have ever known. End of chapter three.