The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

sort of debt of honor, I believe. Once saved Gloria from drowning, or something of the sort. Second Young Man I didn’t think she could stop that perpetual swaying long enough to swim. Fill up my glass, will you? Old man and I had a long talk about the weather just now. Maury Who? Old Adam? Second Young Man No, the bride’s father. He must be with a weather bureau. Dick He’s my uncle, Otis. Otis Well, it’s an honorable profession. Laughter. Sixth Young Man Bride your cousin, isn’t she? Dick Yes, Cable, she is. Cable She certainly is a beauty. Not like you, Dicky. Bet she brings old Anthony to terms. Maury Why are all grooms given the title of “old”? I think marriage is an error of youth. Dick Maury, the professional cynic. Maury Why, you intellectual faker! Fifth Young Man Battle of the highbrows here, Otis. Pick up what crumbs you can. Dick Faker yourself! What do you know? Maury What do you know? Dick Ask me anything. Any branch of knowledge. Maury All right. What’s the fundamental principle of biology? Dick You don’t know yourself. Maury Don’t hedge! Dick Well, natural selection? Maury Wrong. Dick I give it up. Maury Ontogony recapitulates phyllogony. Fifth Young Man Take your base! Maury Ask you another. What’s the influence of mice on the clover crop? Laughter. Fourth Young Man What’s the influence of rats on the Decalogue? Maury Shut up, you saphead. There is a connection. Dick What is it then? Maury Pausing a moment in growing disconcertion. Why, let’s see. I seem to have forgotten exactly. Something about the bees eating the clover. Fifth Young Man And the clover eating the mice! Haw! Haw! Maury Frowning. Let me just think a minute. Dick Sitting up suddenly. Listen! A volley of chatter explodes in the adjoining room. The six young men arise, feeling at their neckties. Dick Weightily. We’d better join the firing squad. They’re going to take the picture, I guess. No, that’s afterward. Otis Cable, you take the ragtime bridesmaid. Fourth Young Man I wish to God I’d sent that present. Maury If you’ll give me another minute I’ll think of that about the mice. Otis I was usher last month for old Charlie McIntyre and⁠— They move slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans from Adam Patch’s organ.

Anthony

There were five hundred eyes boring through the back of his cutaway and the sun glinting on the clergyman’s inappropriately bourgeois teeth. With difficulty he restrained a laugh. Gloria was saying something in a clear proud voice and he tried to think that the affair was irrevocable, that every second was significant, that his life was being slashed into two periods and that the face of the world was changing before him. He tried to recapture that ecstatic sensation of ten weeks before. All these emotions eluded him, he did not even feel the physical nervousness of that very morning⁠—it was all one gigantic aftermath. And those gold teeth! He wondered if the clergyman were married; he wondered perversely if a clergyman could perform his own marriage service.⁠ ⁠…

But as he took Gloria into his arms he was conscious of a strong reaction. The blood was moving in his veins now. A languorous and pleasant content settled like a weight upon him, bringing responsibility and possession. He was married.

Gloria

So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from the others! She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding in at the windows. She was beyond all conscious perceptions. Only a sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately important was happening⁠—and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and securely safe.

Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where the night clerk at the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit them, on the grounds that they were not married.

The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful. He did not think that anything so beautiful as Gloria could be moral.

“Con Amore”

That first half-year⁠—the trip West, the long months’ loiter along the California coast, and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived until late autumn made the country dreary⁠—those days, those places, saw the enraptured hours. The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfilment which stands back of all life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain.⁠ ⁠…

The idyl passed, bearing with it its extortion of youth. Came a day when Gloria found that other men no longer bored her; came a day when Anthony discovered that he could sit again late into the evening, talking with Dick of those tremendous abstractions that had once occupied his world. But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered⁠—by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.

It was, first of all, a time of discovery. The things they found in each other were so diverse, so intermixed and, moreover, so sugared with love as to seem at the time not so much discoveries as isolated phenomena⁠—to be allowed for, and to be forgotten. Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness. Gloria knew within a month that her