The Curious Case of Benjamin Button By F. Scott Fitzgerald (Audio Books)

 

 

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 

 

By F. Scott Fitzgerald 

 

(Audio Books)

 

Description

A life lived backwards, with events happening in reverse order forms the strange and unexpected framework of one of F Scott Fitzgerald's rare short stories.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was published in Collier's in 1927 and the idea came to Fitzgerald apparently from a quote of Mark Twain's in which he regretted that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst at the end. Fitzgerald's concept of using this notion and turning the normal sequence of life on its head resulted in this delightful, thought provoking fantasy tale. The story was later incorporated in a Fitzgerald anthology, Tales of the Jazz Age.

The story opens with a young, high society couple who are shocked beyond belief when they discover that their much awaited first born child resembles an elderly gent of seventy, complete with a white beard and whiskers, sitting up and querulously demanding to know, “Are you my father?” Their young son is born to live out a peculiar destiny. And so begins a grotesque journey through life, with the child, Benjamin “growing down” instead of up.

Set in the Baltimore of the 1860s the story is also a satire of contemporary American society of the time. Though Fitzgerald maintains a cool and light tone throughout the story, it is in fact, deeply reflective and a very interesting take on the human condition.

For contemporary readers who are familiar with the problems of aging and “second childhood” Benjamin Button's difficulties with dealing with the demands of his chronological age vs his mental age are extremely interesting. As we find more and more older people succumbing to Alzheimer's disease and dementia, requiring the kind of care that an infant does, the story is strangely prophetic of the condition of geriatric care in our century. The plot is not exactly new to literature, with several stories and novels being written on a similar theme by many other writers. However, Fitzgerald's take on growing old and how we humans deal with it is what sets The Curious Case of Benjamin Button apart.

The style is extremely readable, the premise is intriguing and refreshingly different and appeals to readers of all ages. The story was adapted into a film in 2008 and continues to fascinate Fitzgerald fans the world over.

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About the Author 

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), better known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American author of novels and short stories, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in an Irish middle class family. He is best known for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

The author was named after his famous second cousin, Francis Scott Key, who penned The Star Spangled Banner.

Fitzgerald's prolific short stories tend to center around the promise of youth, followed by the effects of age and despair. Fitzgerald was considered one of the best authors of the twentieth century, a leading voice for the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s and the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a great deal of his youth in Buffalo, New York, then moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. Fitzgerald dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 on the brink of World War I, but did not see combat. He became an officer, married, and after being decommissioned, went to New York City to pursue his literary career. This Side of Paradise was his first successful novel, allowing him to travel extensively in Paris and the French Riviera in the 1920s, creating the backdrop for his most widely-acclaimed work, The Great Gatsby which was published in 1925. He befriended great authors such as Ernest Hemingway during this period. Fitzgerald contributed stories to The Saturday Evening Post for most of his career. The first story in which his name appeared on the cover was Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920).

Fitzgerald was in poor health after spending most of his adulthood abusing alcohol and suffered three heart attacks. He died at the age of 44 in 1941.

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Short Story Of The Day: On Your Own by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

On Your Own

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

---

 

The third time he walked around the deck Evelyn stared at him. She stood leaning against the bulwark and when she heard his footsteps again she turned frankly and held his eyes for a moment until his turned away, as a woman can when she has the protection of other men’s company, Barlotto, playing ping-pong with Eddie O’Sullivan, noticed the encounter. “Aha!” he said, before the stroller was out of hearing, and when the rally was finished: “Then you’re still interested even if it’s not the German Prince.”

“How do you know it’s not the German Prince?” Evelyn demanded.

“Because the German Prince is the horse-faced man with white eyes. This one”—he took a passenger list from his pocket—“is either Mr George Ives, Mr Jubal Early Robbins and valet, or Mr Joseph Widdle with Mrs Widdle and six children.”

It was a medium-sized German boat, five days westbound from Cherbourg. The month was February and the sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.

K’tap K’tap K’tap K’tap. Barlotto looked like Valentino—since he got fresh in the rumba number she had disliked playing opposite him. But Eddie O’Sullivan had been one of her best friends in the company.

Subconsciously she was waiting for the solitary promenader to round the deck again but he didn’t. She faced about and looked at the sea through the glass windows; instantly her throat closed and she held herself dose to the wooden rail to keep her shoulders from shaking. Her thoughts rang aloud in her ears: “My father is dead—when I was little we would walk to town on Sunday morning, I in my starched dress, and he would buy the Washington paper and a cigar and he was so proud of his pretty little girl. He was always so proud of me—he came to New York to see me when I opened with the Marx Brothers and he told everybody in the hotel he was my father, even the elevator boys. I’m glad he did, it was so much pleasure for him, perhaps the best time he ever had since he was young. He would like it if he knew I was coming all the way from London.”

“Game and set,” said Eddie.

She turned around. “We’ll go down and wake up the Barneys and have some bridge, eh?” suggested Barlotto.

Evelyn led the way, pirouetting once and again on the moist deck, then breaking into an “Off to Buffalo” against a sudden breath of wet wind. At the door she slipped and fell inward down the stair, saved herself by a perilous one-arm swing—and was brought up against the solitary promenader. Her mouth fell open comically—she balanced for a moment Then the man said, “I beg your pardon,” in an unmistakably southern voice. She met his eyes again as the three of them passed on. The man picked up Eddie O’Sullivan in the smoking room the next afternoon.

“Aren’t you the London cast of Chronic Affection?”

“We were until three days ago. We were going to run another two weeks but Miss Lovejoy was called to America so we closed.”

“The whole cast on board?” The man’s curiosity was inoffensive, it was a really friendly interest combined with a polite deference to the romance of the theatre. Eddie O’Sullivan liked him.

“Sure, sit down. No, there’s only Barlotto, the juvenile, and Miss Lovejoy and Charles Barney, the producer, and his wife. We left in twenty-four hours—the others are coming on the Homeric.”

“I certainly did enjoy seeing your show. I’ve been on a trip around the world and I turned up in London two weeks ago just ready for something American—and you had it.”

An hour later Evelyn poked her head around the corner of the smoking-room door and found them there.

“Why are you hiding out on us?” she demanded. “Who’s going to laugh at my stuff? That bunch of card sharps down there?”

Eddie introduced Mr George Ives. Evelyn saw a handsome, well-built man of thirty with a firm and restless face. At the corners of his eyes two pairs of fine wrinkles indicated an effort to meet the world on some other basis than its own. On his pan George Ives saw a rather small dark-haired girl of twenty-six, burning with a vitality that could only be described as “professional”. Which is to say it was not amateur—it could never use itself up upon any one person or group. At moments it possessed her so entirely, turning every shade of expression, every casual gesture, into a thing of such moment that she seemed to have no real self of her own. Her mouth was made of two small intersecting cherries pointing off into a bright smile; she had enormous, dark brown eyes. She was not beautiful but it took her only about ten seconds to persuade people that she was. Her body was lovely with little concealed muscles of iron. She was in black now and overdressed—she was always very chic and a little overdressed.

“I’ve been admiring you ever since you hurled yourself at me yesterday afternoon,” he said.

“I had to make you some way or other, didn’t I? What’s a girl going to with herself on a boat—fish?” They sat down.

“Have you been in England long?” George asked. “About five years—I go bigger over there.” In its serious moments her voice had the ghost of a British accent. “I’m not really very good at anything—I sing a little, dance a little, down a little, so the English think they’re getting a bargain. In New York they want specialists.”

It was apparent that she would have preferred an equivalent popularity in New York.

Barney, Mrs Barney and Barlotto came into the bar. “Aha!” Barlotto cried when George Ives was introduced. “She won’t believe he’s not the Prince.” He put his hand on George’s knee. “Miss Lovejoy was looking for the Prince the first day when she heard he was on board. We told her it was you.”

Evelyn was weary of Barlotto, weary of all of them, except Eddie O’Sullivan, though she was too tactful to have shown it when they were working together. She looked around. Save for two Russian priests playing chess their party was alone in the smoking-room—there were only thirty first-class passengers, with accommodations for two hundred. Again she wondered what sort of an America she was going back to. Suddenly the room depressed her—it was too big, too empty to fill and she felt the necessity of creating some responsive joy and gaiety around her.

“Let’s go down to my salon,” she suggested, pouring all her enthusiasm into her voice, making them a free and thrilling promise. “We’ll play the phonograph and send for the handsome doctor and the chief engineer and get them in a game of stud. I’ll be the decoy.”

As they went downstairs she knew she was doing this for the new man.

She wanted to play to him, show him what a good time she could give people. With the phonograph wailing “You’re driving me crazy” she began building up a legend. She was a “gun moll” and the whole trip had been a I frame to get Mr Ives into the hands of the mob. Her throaty mimicry flicked here and there from one to the other; two ship’s officers coming in were caught up in it and without knowing much English still understood the verve and magic of the impromptu performance. She was Anne Pennington, Helen Morgan, the effeminate waiter who came in for an order, she was everyone there in turn, and all in pace with the ceaseless music.

Later George Ives invited them all to dine with him in the upstairs restaurant that night. And as the party broke up and Evelyn’s eyes sought his approval he asked her to walk with him before dinner.

The deck was still damp, still canvassed in against the persistent of rain. The lights were a dim and murky yellow and blankets tumbled awry on empty deck chairs.

“You were a treat,” he said. “You’re like—Mickey Mouse.”

She took his arm and bent double over it with laughter.

“I like being Mickey Mouse. Look—there’s where I stood and stared you every time you walked around. Why didn’t you come around the fourth time?”

“I was embarrassed so I went up to the boat deck.”

As they turned at the bow there was a great opening of doors and a flooding out of people who rushed to the rail.

“They must have had a poor supper,” Evelyn said. “No—look!”

It was the Europa—a moving island of light. It grew larger minute by minute, swelled into a harmonious fairyland with music from its deck and searchlights playing on its own length. Through field-glasses they could discern figures lining the rail and Evelyn spun out the personal history of a man who was pressing his own pants in a cabin. Charmed they watched its sure matchless speed.

“Oh, Daddy, buy me that!” Evelyn cried, and then something suddenly broke inside her—the sight of beauty, the reaction to her late excitement choked her up and she thought vividly of her father. Without a word she went inside.

Two days later she stood with George Ives on the deck while the gaunt scaffolding of Coney Island slid by.

“What was Barlotto saying to you just now?” she demanded.

George laughed.

“He was saying just about what Barney said this afternoon, only he was more excited about it.”

She groaned.

“He said that you played with everybody—and that I was foolish if I thought this little boat flirtation meant anything—everybody had been through being in love with you and nothing ever came of it.”

“He wasn’t in love with me,” she protested. “He got fresh in a dance we had together and I called him for it.”

“Barney was wrought up too—said he felt like a father to you.”

“They make me tired,” she exclaimed. “Now they think they’re in love with me just because——”

“Because they see I am.”

“Because they think I’m interested in you. None of them were so eager until two days ago. So long as I make them laugh it’s all right but the minute I have any impulse of my own they all bustle up and think they’re being so protective. I suppose Eddie O’Sullivan will be next.”

“It was my fault telling them we found we lived only a few miles from each other in Maryland.”

“No, it’s just that I’m the only decent-looking girl on an eight-day boat, and the boys are beginning to squabble among themselves. Once they’re in New York they’ll forget I’m alive.”

Still later they were together when the city burst thunderously upon them in the early dusk—the high white range of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge, rising again into uptown New York, hallowed with diadems of foamy light, suspended from the stars.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Evelyn sobbed. “I cry so much lately. Maybe I’ve been handling a parrot.”

The German band started to play on deck but the sweeping majesty of the city made the inarch trivial and tinkling; after a moment it died away.

“Oh, God! It’s so beautiful,” she whispered brokenly.

If he had not been going south with her the affair would probably have ended an hour later in the customs shed. And as they rode south to Washington next day he receded for the moment and her father came nearer. He was just a nice American who attracted her physically—a little necking behind a lifeboat in the darkness. At the iron grating in the Washington station where their ways divided she kissed him good-bye and for the time forgot him altogether as her train shambled down into the low-forested clayland of southern Maryland. Screening her eyes with her hands Evelyn looked out upon the dark infrequent villages and the scattered farm lights. Rocktown was a shrunken little station and there was her brother with a neighbour’s Ford—she was ashamed that her luggage was so good against the exploded upholstery. She saw a star she knew and heard Negro laughter from out of the night; the breeze was cool but in it there was some smell she recognized—she was home.

At the service next day in the Rocktown churchyard, the sense that she was on a stage, that she was being watched, froze Evelyn’s grief—then it was over and the country doctor lay among a hundred Lovejoys and Dorseys and Crawshaws. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Then as they turned from the graveside her eyes fell on George Ives who stood a little apart with his hat in his hand. Outside the gate he spoke to her.

“You’ll excuse my coming. I had to see that you were all right.”

“Can’t you take me away somewhere now?” she asked impulsively. “I can’t stand much of this. I want to go to New York tonight.”

His face fell. “So soon?”

“I’ve got to be learning a lot of new dance routines and freshening up my stuff. You get sort of stale abroad.”

He called for her that afternoon, crisp and shining as his coupe. As they started off she noticed that the men in the gasoline stations seemed to know him with liking and respect. He fitted into the quickening spring landscape, into a legendary Maryland of graciousness and gallantry. He had not the range of a European; he gave her little of that constant reassurance as to her attractiveness—there were whole half-hours when he seemed scarcely aware of her at all.

They stopped once more at the churchyard—she brought a great armful of flowers to leave as a last offering on her father’s grave. Leaving him at the gate she went in.

The flowers scattered on the brown unsettled earth. She had no more ties here now and she did not know whether she would come back any more. She knelt down. All these dead, she knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with hard blue flashing eyes, their spare violent bodies, their souls made of new earth in the long forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century. Minute by minute the spell grew on her until it was hard to struggle back to the old world where she had dined with kings and princes, where her name in letters two feet high challenged the curiosity of the night A line of William McFee’s surged through her:

O staunch old heart that toiled so long for me
I waste my years sailing along the sea.

The words released her—she broke suddenly and sat back on her heels, crying.

How long she was staying she didn’t know; the flowers had grown invisible when a voice called her name from the churchyard and she got up and wiped her eyes.

“I’m coming.” And then, “Good-bye then Father, all my fathers.”

George helped her into the car and wrapped a robe around her. Then he took a long drink of country rye from his flask.

“Kiss me before we start,” he said suddenly.

She put up her face towards him.

“No, really kiss me.”

“Not now.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“I don’t feel like it, and my face is dirty.”

“As if that mattered.”

His persistence annoyed her.

“Let’s go on,” she said.

He put the car into gear.

“Sing me a song.”

“Not now, I don’t feel like it.”

He drove fast for half an hour—then he stopped under thick sheltering trees.

“Time for another drink. Don’t you think you better have one—it’s getting cold.”

“You know I don’t drink. You have one.”

“If you don’t mind.”

When he had swallowed he turned towards her again.

“I think you might kiss me now.”

Again she kissed him obediently but he was not satisfied.

“I mean really,” he repeated. “Don’t hold away like that. You know I’m in love with you and you say you like me.”

“Of course I do,” she said impatiently, “but there are times and times. This isn’t one of them. Let’s go on.”

“But I thought you liked me.”

“I won’t if you act this way.”

“You don’t like me then.”

“Oh don’t be absurd,” she broke out, “of course I like you, but I want to get to Washington.”

“We’ve got lots of time.” And then as she didn’t answer, “Kiss me once before we start.”

She grew angry. If she had liked him less she could have laughed him out of this mood. But there was no laughter in her—only an increasing distaste for the situation.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “this car is very stubborn. It refuses to start until you kiss me.” He put his hand on hers but she drew hers away.

“Now look here.” Her temper mounted into her cheeks, her forehead. “If there was anything you could do to spoil everything it was just this. I thought people only acted like this in cartoons. It’s so utterly crude and”—she searched for a word—“and American. You only forgot to call me „baby“.”

“Oh.” After a minute he started the engine and then the car. The lights of Washington were a red blur against the sky.

“Evelyn,” he said presently. “I can’t think of anything more natural than wanting to kiss you, I——”

“Oh, it was so clumsy,” she interrupted. “Half a pint of corn whisky and then telling me you wouldn’t start the car unless I kissed you. I’m not used to that sort of thing. I’ve always had men treat me with the greatest delicacy. Men have been challenged to duels for staring at me in a casino—and then you, that I liked so much, try a thing like that. I can’t stand it——” And again she repeated, bitterly “It’s so American.”

“Well, I haven’t any sense of guilt about it but I’m sorry I upset you.”

“Don’t you see?” she demanded. “If I’d wanted to kiss you I’d have managed managed to let you know.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” he repeated. They had dinner in the station buffet. He left her at the door of her pullman car.

“Good-bye,” she said, but coolly now, “Thank you for an awfully interesting trip. And call me up when you come to New York.”

“Isn’t this silly,” he protested. “You’re not even going to kiss me good-bye.”

She didn’t want to at all now and she hesitated before leaning forward lightly from the step. But this time he drew back.

“Never mind,” he said. “I understand how you feel. I’ll see you when I come to New York.”

He took off his hat, bowed politely and walked away. Feeling very alone and lost Evelyn went on into the car. That was for meeting people on boats, she thought, but she kept on feeling strangely alone.

II

She climbed a network of steel, concrete and glass, walked under a high echoing dome and came out into New York. She was part of it even before she reached her hotel. When she saw mail waiting for her and flowers around her suite, she was sure she wanted to live and work here with this great current of excitement flowing through her from dawn to dusk.

Within two days she was putting in several hours a morning Umbering up neglected muscles, an hour of new soft-shoe stuff with Joe Crusoe, and making a tour of the city to look at every entertainer who had something new.

Also she was weighing the prospects for her next engagement. In the background was the chance of going to London as a co-featured player in a Gershwin show then playing New York. Yet there was an air of repetition about it. New York excited her and she wanted to get something here. This was difficult—she had little following in America, show business was in a bad way—after a while her agent brought her several offers for shows that were going into rehearsal this fall. Meanwhile she was getting a little in debt and it was convenient that there were almost always men to take her to dinner and the theatre.

March blew past. Evelyn learned new steps and performed in half a dozen benefits; the season was waning. She dickered with the usual young impresarios who wanted to “build something around her”, but who seemed never to have the money, the theatre and the material at one and the same time. A week before she must decide about the English offer she heard from George Ives.

She heard directly, in the form of a telegram announcing his arrival, and indirectly in the form of a comment from her lawyer when she mentioned the fact. He whistled.

“Woman, have you snared George Ives? You don’t need any more jobs. A lot of girls have worn out their shoes chasing him.”

“Why, what’s his claim to fame?”

“He’s rich as Croesus—he’s the smartest young lawyer in the South, and they’re trying to run him now for governor of his state. In his spare time he’s one of the best polo players in America.” Evelyn whistled. “This is news,” she said.

She was startled. Her feelings about him suddenly changed—everything he had done began to assume significance. It impressed her that while she ad told him all about her public self he had hinted nothing of this. Now she remembered him talking aside with some ship reporters at the dock.

He came on a soft poignant day, gentle and spirited. She was engaged for lunch but he picked her up at the Ritz afterwards and they drove in Central Park. When she saw in a new revelation his pleasant eyes and his mouth that told how hard he was on himself, her heart swung towards him—she told him she was sorry about that night.

“I didn’t object to what you did but to the way you did it,” she said. “It’s all forgotten. Let’s be happy.”

“It all happened so suddenly,” he said. “It was disconcerting to look up suddenly on a boat and see the girl you’ve always wanted.”

“It was nice, wasn’t it?”

“I thought that anything so like a casual flower needn’t be respected. But that was all the more reason for treating it gently.”

“What nice words,” she teased him. “If you keep on I’m going to throw myself under the wheels of the cab.”

Oh, she liked him. They dined together and went to a play and in the taxi going back to her hotel she looked up at him and waited.

“Would you consider marrying me?”

“Yes, I’d consider marrying you.”

“Of course if you married me we’d live in New York.”

“Call me Mickey Mouse,” she said suddenly.

“Why?”

“I don’t know—it was fun when you called me Mickey Mouse.”

The taxi stopped at her hotel.

“Won’t you come in and talk for a while?” she asked. Her bodice was stretched tight across her heart. “Mother’s here in New York with me and I promised I’d go and see her for a while.”

“Oh.”

“Will you dine with us tomorrow night?”

“All right.”

She hurried in and up to her room and put on the phonograph.

“Oh, gosh, he’s going to respect me,” she thought. “He doesn’t know anything about me, he doesn’t know anything about women. He wants to make a goddess out of me and I want to be Mickey Mouse.” She went to the mirror swaying softly before it.

Lady play your mandolin Lady let that tune begin. At her agent’s next morning she ran into Eddie O’Sullivan.

“Are you married yet?” he demanded. “Or did you ever see him again?”

“Eddie, I don’t know what to do. I think I’m in love with him but we’re always out of step with each other.”

“Take him in hand.”

“That’s just what I don’t want to do. I want to be taken in hand myself.”

“Well, you’re twenty-six—you’re in love with him. Why don’t you marry him? It’s a bad season.”

“He’s so American,” she answered.

“You’ve lived abroad so long that you don’t know what you want.”

“It’s a man’s place to make me certain.” It was in a mood of revolt against what she felt was to be an inspection that she made a midnight rendezvous for afterwards to go to Chaplin’s film with two other men—“because I frightened him in Maryland and he’ll only leave me politely at my door”. She pulled all her dresses out of her wardrobe and defiantly chose a startling gown from Vionnet; when George called for her at seven she summoned him up to her suite and displayed it, half hoping he would protest. “Wouldn’t you rather I’d go as a convent girl?”

“Don’t change anything. I worship you.” But she didn’t want to be worshipped.

It was still light outside and she liked being next to him in the car. She felt fresh and young under the fresh young silk—she would be glad to ride with him for ever, if only she were sure they were going somewhere.

… The suite at the Plaza dosed around them; lamps were lighted in the salon.

“We’re really almost neighbours in Maryland,” said Mrs Ives. “Your name’s familiar in St Charles county and there’s a fine old house called Lovejoy Hall. Why don’t you buy it and restore it?”

“There’s no money in the family,” said Evelyn bluntly. “I’m the only hope, and actresses never save.”

When the other guest arrived Evelyn started. Of all shades of her past—Colonel Cary. She wanted to laugh, or else hide—for an instant she wondered if this had been calculated. But she saw in his surprise that it was impossible.

“Delighted to see you again,” he said simply.

As they sat down at table Mrs Ives remarked:

“Miss Lovejoy is from our part of Maryland.”

“I see,” Colonel Cary looked at Evelyn with the equivalent of a wink. His expression annoyed her and she flushed. Evidently he knew nothing about her success on the stage, remembered only an episode of six years ago. When champagne was served she let a waiter fill her glass lest Colonel Cary think that she was playing an unsophisticated role.

“I thought you were a teetotaller,” George observed.

“I am. This is about the third drink I ever had in my life.”

The wine seemed to clarify matters; it made her see the necessity of anticipating whatever the Colonel might afterwards tell the Ives. Her glass was filled again. A little later Colonel Cary gave an opportunity when he asked:

“What have you been doing all these years?”

“I’m on the stage.” She turned to Mrs Ives. “Colonel Cary and I met in my most difficult days.”

“Yes?”

The Colonel’s face reddened but Evelyn continued steadily.

“For two months I was what used to be called a „party girl“.”

“A party girl?” repeated Mrs Ives puzzled.

“It’s a New York phenomenon,” said George.

Evelyn smiled at the Colonel. “It used to amuse me.”

“Yes, very amusing,” he said.

“Another girl and I had just left school and decided to go on the stage. We waited around agencies and offices for months and there were literally days when we didn’t have enough to eat.”

“How terrible,” said Mrs Ives.

“Then somebody told us about „party girls“. Businessmen with clients from out of town sometimes wanted to give them a big time—singing a dancing and champagne, all that sort of thing, make them feel like regular fellows seeing New York. So they’d hire a room in a restaurant and invite a dozen party girls. All it required was to have a good evening dress and to sit next to some middle-aged man for two hours and laugh at his jokes and maybe kiss him good night. Sometimes you’d find a fifty-dollar bill in your napkin when you sat down at table. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it—but it was salvation to us in that awful three months.”

A silence had fallen, short as far as seconds go but so heavy that Evelyn felt it on her shoulders. She knew that the silence was coming from some deep place in Mrs Ives’s heart, that Mrs Ives was ashamed for her and felt that what she had done in the struggle for survival was unworthy of the dignity of woman. In those same seconds she sensed the Colonel chuckling maliciously behind his bland moustache, felt the wrinkles beside George’s eyes straining.

“It must be terribly hard to get started on the stage,” said Mrs Ives. “Tell me—have you acted mostly in England?”

“Yes.”

What had she said? Only the truth and the whole truth in spite of the old man leering there. She drank off her glass of champagne.

George spoke quickly, under the Colonel’s roar of conversation: “Isn’t that a lot of champagne if you’re not used to it?”

She saw him suddenly as a man dominated by his mother; her frank little reminiscence had shocked him. Things were different for a girl on her own and at least he should see that it was wiser than that Colonel Cary might launch dark implications thereafter. But she refused further champagne.

After dinner she sat with George at the piano.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have said that at dinner,” she whispered.

“Nonsense! Mother know everything’s changed nowadays.”

“She didn’t like it,” Evelyn insisted. “And as for that old boy that looks like a Peter Arno cartoon!”

Try as she might Evelyn couldn’t shake off the impression that some slight had been put upon her. She was accustomed only to having approval gad admiration around her.

“If you had to choose again would you choose the stage?” Mrs Ives asked.

“It’s a nice life,” Evelyn said emphatically. “If I had daughters with talent I’d choose it for them. I certainly wouldn’t want them to be society girls.”

“But we can’t all have talent,” said Colonel Cary.

“Of course most people have the craziest prejudices about the stage,” pursued Evelyn.

“Not so much nowadays,” said Mrs Ives. “So many nice girls go on the stage.”

“Girls of position,” added Colonel Cary.

“They don’t usually last very long,” said Evelyn. “Every time some debutante decides to dazzle the world there’s another flop due on Broadway. But the thing that makes me maddest is the way people condescend. I remember one season on the road—all the small-town social leaders inviting you to parties and then whispering and snickering in the corner. Snickering at Gladys Knowles!” Evelyn’s voice rang with indignation: “When Gladys goes to Europe she dines with the most prominent people in every country, the people who don’t know these backwoods social leaders exist——”

“Does she dine with their wives too?” asked Colonel Cary.

“With their wives too.” She glanced sharply at Mrs Ives. “Let me tell you that girls on the stage don’t feel a bit inferior, and the really fashionable people don’t think of patronizing them.”

The silence was there again heavier and deeper, but this time excited by her own words Evelyn was unconscious of it.

“Oh, it’s American women,” she said. “The less they have to offer the more they pick on the ones that have.”

She drew a deep breath, she felt that the room was stifling.

“I’m afraid I must go now,” she said.

“I’ll take you,” said George.

They were all standing. She shook hands. She liked George’s mother, who after all had made no attempt to patronize her.

“It’s been very nice,” said Mrs Ives.

“I hope we’ll meet soon. Good night.”

With George in a taxi she gave the address of a theatre on Broadway.

“I have a date,” she confessed.

“I see.”

“Nothing very important.” She glanced at him, and put her hand on his. Why didn’t he ask her to break the date? But he only said:

“He better go over Forty-fifth Street.”

Ah, well, maybe she’d better go back to England—and be Mickey Mouse, He didn’t know anything about women, anything about love, and to her that was the unforgivable sin. But why in a certain set of his face under the street lamps did he remind her of her father?

“Won’t you come to the picture?” she suggested.

“I’m feeling a little tired—I’m turning in.”

“Will you phone me tomorrow?”

“Certainly.”

She hesitated. Something was wrong and she hated to leave him. He helped her out of the taxi and paid it.

“Come with us?” she asked almost anxiously. “Listen, if you like——”

“I’m going to walk for a while!”

She caught sight of the men waiting for her and waved to them.

“George, is anything the matter?” she said.

“Of course not.”

He had never seemed so attractive, so desirable to her. As her friends came up, two actors, looking like very little fish beside him, he took off his hat and said:

“Good night, I hope you enjoy the picture.”

“George——”

— and a curious thing happened. Now for the first time she realized that her father was dead, that she was alone. She had thought of herself as being self-reliant, making more in some seasons than his practice brought him in five years. But he had always been behind her somewhere, his love had always been behind her—She had never been a waif, she had always had a place to go. And now she was alone, alone in the swirling indifferent crowd. Did she expect to love this man, who offered her so much, with the naive romantics of eighteen. He loved her—he loved her more than any one in the world loved her. She wasn’t ever going to be a great star, she knew that, and she had reached the time when a girl had to look out for herself. “Why, look,” she said, “I’ve got to go. Wait—or don’t wait.” Catching up her long gown she sped up Broadway. The crowd was enormous as theatre after theatre eddied out to the sidewalks. She sought for his silk hat as for a standard, but now there were many silk hats. She peered frantically into groups and crowds as she ran. An insolent voice called after her and again she shuddered with a sense of being unprotected. Reaching the corner she peered hopelessly into the tangled mass of the block ahead. But he had probably turned off Broadway so she darted left down the dimmer alley of Forty-eighth Street. Then she saw him, walking briskly, like a man leaving something behind—and overtook him at Sixth Avenue.

“George,” she cried.

He turned; his face looking at her was hard and miserable. “George, I didn’t want to go to that picture, I wanted you to make me not go. Why didn’t you ask me not to go?”

“I didn’t care whether you went or not.”

“Didn’t you?” she cried. “Don’t you care for me any more?”

“Do you want me to call you a cab?”

“No, I want to be with you.”

“I’m going home.”

“I’ll walk with you. What is it, George? What have I done?” They crossed Sixth Avenue and the street became darker. “What is it, George? Please tell me. If I did something wrong at your mother’s why didn’t you stop me?” He stopped suddenly. “You were our guest,” he said. “What did I do?”

“There’s no use going into it.” He signalled a passing taxi. “It’s quite obvious that we look at things differently. I was going to write you tomorrow but since you ask me it’s just as well to end it today.” “But why, George?” She wailed, “What did I do?” “You went out of your way to make a preposterous attack on an old gentlewoman who had given you nothing but courtesy and consideration.” “Oh, George, I didn’t, I didn’t… I’ll go to her and apologize. I’ll go tonight.”

“She wouldn’t understand. We simply look at things in different ways.”

“Oh—h-h.” She stood aghast.

He started to say something further, but after a glance at her he opened the taxi door.

“It’s only two blocks. You’ll excuse me if I don’t go with you.”

She had turned and was clinging to the iron railing of a stair.

“I’ll go in a minute,” she said. “Don’t wait.”

She wasn’t acting now. She wanted to be dead. She was crying for her father, she told herself—not for him but for her father.

His footsteps moved off, stopped, hesitated—came back.

“Evelyn.”

His voice was close beside her.

“Oh, poor baby,” it said. He turned her about gently in his arms and she clung to him.

“Oh yes,” she cried in wild relief. “Poor baby—just your poor baby.” She didn’t know whether this was love or not but she knew with all her heart and soul that she wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe for ever.

---

 

Notes

“On Your Own” was written as “Home to Maryland” in the spring of 1931 after Fitzgerald’s return to Europe from his father’s funeral, a strongly emotional event for him. Edward Fitzgerald was buried in the little cemetery of St Mary’s Catholic Church on Rockville, Maryland—changed to “Rocktown” in the story—now a suburb of Washington, but then the sleepy county seat where he had been raised during and after the Civil War. “Then it was over,” the story says, “and the country doctor lay among a hundred Lovejoys and Dorseys and Crawshaws.”

This story shows the way Fitzgerald took an emotion and wove his hyperbolic magic around it. Though he had no ancestors named Lovejoy or Crawshaw, he was indeed descended from a long line of imposing Dorseys going back to the original Edward, who moved to Maryland from Virginia in 1650. Not a Dorsey is buried at St Mary’s but a few Scotts, with whom they intermarried, are, inspiring the line repeated in Tender Is the Night, “It was very friendly leaving Mm there with all his relations around him.” Later in the story, the heroine is asked why she doesn’t buy and restore “a fine old house called Lovejoy Hall” in “St Charles County”, which had belonged to one of her Lovejoy forebears. This is a reference to “Tudor Half, home of Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandfather Philip Key, a member of the Continental Congress, in the southern Maryland county of St Mary’s. It was for sale at that time, as he must have heard from relatives at the funeral.

Over the five years after it was written, “On Your Own” was declined by seven magazines, the first time this had happened to a Fitzgerald story since his apprentice days. It is one of the stories he “stripped” for his Notebooks, salvaging favourite passages for later use. “On Your Own” is included here because it is the only remaining unpublished story bearing, in his words, that “one little drop of something … the extra I had.” 

 

About the Author 

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), better known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American author of novels and short stories, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in an Irish middle class family. He is best known for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

The author was named after his famous second cousin, Francis Scott Key, who penned The Star Spangled Banner.

Fitzgerald's prolific short stories tend to center around the promise of youth, followed by the effects of age and despair. Fitzgerald was considered one of the best authors of the twentieth century, a leading voice for the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s and the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a great deal of his youth in Buffalo, New York, then moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. Fitzgerald dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 on the brink of World War I, but did not see combat. He became an officer, married, and after being decommissioned, went to New York City to pursue his literary career. This Side of Paradise was his first successful novel, allowing him to travel extensively in Paris and the French Riviera in the 1920s, creating the backdrop for his most widely-acclaimed work, The Great Gatsby which was published in 1925. He befriended great authors such as Ernest Hemingway during this period. Fitzgerald contributed stories to The Saturday Evening Post for most of his career. The first story in which his name appeared on the cover was Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920).

Fitzgerald was in poor health after spending most of his adulthood abusing alcohol and suffered three heart attacks. He died at the age of 44 in 1941.

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Shaggy's Morning by F Scott Fitzgerald

 

Shaggy's Morning

by

F Scott Fitzgerald

---

First published in Esquire, May 1935.

---

I woke up after a lousy dream, and as soon as the old beezer came alive I went around the yard trying to pick up something interesting, but the wind was too strong.

There was an old biscuit in my dish and if there's anything gloomier than one dead biscuit on a windy morning I don't know about it.

The Brain came downstairs early like she usually does ever since she began staying away all day long. I gave her a rush, and I meant it, too. I'm not one of these diggities that think their boss is a god, even if he's an old nigger that smells like everybody that gave him his clothes—but really anybody would have to hand it to the Brain.

Since I grew up and got the idea that they don't go in much for any perfumes except their own, I never had any trouble with her—except the time I brought her that bone in the middle of the night and she hit me in the eye with it.

I was hoping it was about the right day to go out in the country and swim, but nothing doing—she got into her moving room at the usual time and shoved off, and I had to amuse myself. It wasn't the first time I wished I had something regular to do. My friend across the street was waiting for his chow, which he gets in the morning, so I had a workout with the little squirt next door. He came tearing over, cursing and threatening, because he knew I never hurt him.

"You big, clumsy tub of hair, I could run rings around you, and I'm out to prove it!"

"Yeah?" I said, kind of amused, because he talks as if he meant it, and we went through a routine with a lot of false starts, charges, leg and throat holds, rollaways, and escapes. It was all right, and after, while we were panting plenty, but I don't get much of a workout with him, because he uses up so much time dodging and doing circles. I like a dog to go in and take it. Even a little fellow like him. Once he let a tooth slip and nipped me, and I gave him hell.

"Don't take advantage, or I'll tear your coat off."

"Aw, don't get sore."

"Then don't let that tooth slip again."

While we were resting he said: "What are you doing this morning?"

"What's on your mind? You won't get me out after some cat again. Some dogs never grow up."

"It's no cat."

"Then what is it? Meat—or girls?"

"I'll take you there and you can see for yourself."

"You're generous all of a sudden. How big's the dog that's there now?"

While we waited for my friend we did some barking—or rather the squirt did most of it. These little tykes can yelp all day without getting hoarse. He made some circles around a bunch of kids heading for school, and I had a laugh when he got a kick in the ribs and gave out a real yelp. I only barked a little in the base to stretch my throat—I'm not one of the kind always shooting off their mouth.

After my friend came out we went with the squirt to see what he'd found. Just like I thought, it was nothing—a garbage can with a lid you could nose off. I got a whiff of some perfume, too, that bucked me up for a minute, but it was yesterday's, so my friend and I roughed up the squirt for wasting our time and went off on our own.

We followed a tall lady for a while—no particular reason except she had a parcel with meat in it—we knew we wouldn't get any, but you never can tell. Sometimes I just feel like shutting my nose and just following somebody pretending they're yours, or that they're taking you somewhere. After a couple of streets I picked up a new perfume.

"There's some romance," I said.

"Say you got a nose." He tried for it, but didn't get anything.

"I must be getting old. I can always remember shapes, but I get mixed up on perfume."

"Shucks, it's just the wind," I said, to make him feel all right, but he has got a weak nose. Now me, I got a fine nose, but I'm weak on shapes. In a minute, though, he got it, and we left the lady and started back down the street at a trot. Say we must have followed a mile, both of us getting more and more disgusted.

"What's the use?" my friend said. "Either I'm crazy or we're not following one scent, but about ten."

"I get about twenty."

"What say we quit?"

"Well, we're pretty near now."

We got up on a hill presently and looked down—and, say, I haven't seen so many curs since the dog show.

"Sold," I says, and we started home.

The Brain wasn't there yet, but the Beard was. He got out that damn pole and tried to kid me again, holding it out and jabbering—a long time ago I figured out that his object is to see if I'm fool enough to jump over it. But I don't bite, just walk round it. Then he tried the trick they all do—held my paws and tried to balance me up on the end of my spine. I never could figure out the point of that one.

He started the music-box, that tune that makes my ear hum and starts me howling—so I lammed it out and down the street. A dog passed me carrying a newspaper looking all pleased with himself—but the one time I tried that racket I forgot what it was I was carrying and started to bury it, and when the Beard saw me, was he sore!

Pretty soon I saw my friend coming down the street. He was a fine big dog. He stopped and visited for a minute, with a child he knew, and then he saw me, and came running in my direction. What happened next I couldn't see. It was noon, and there were lots of moving rooms at the cross street—the first thing I knew was that one of them had stopped and then another, and that several people had gotten out. I hurried over with some men.

It was my friend, lying on his side and bleeding out of his mouth; his eyes were open, but his breathing was wrong. Everybody was excited, and they pulled him up on the lawn: by and by his little boy and girl ran out of their house and came over and began to cry. I and another dog that knew him well went up to him, and I wanted to lick him, but when I came really close he snarled, "Scram!" and got half up on his haunches. He thought I was going to eat him just because he was down.

The little boy said, "Get away, you!" and it made me feel bad because I've never eaten a dog in my life, and would not unless I was very hungry. But of course, I went away so as not to worry him, and waited until they carried him away on a blanket. After that we sniffed at the blood in the street and one dog licked it.

In the front yard I howled. I don't know why—then I went to look for the Brain. When I didn't find her I began to figure that maybe something had happened to her, too, and she wouldn't be back any more. I went up on the porch and waited, but she didn't come, so I scratched on the screen and went in and howled a little at the Beard, who gave me a head scratch.

Presently I went to the door, and there was the Brain, getting out of her moving room—I made a rush for her anyhow, and put my nose in her hand and almost tripped her going upstairs. It was good to know she was home. She gave me dinner—the ground beef again and biscuit and milk and a good bone. I picked out the meat first; then I drank the milk and licked the biscuits, but didn't eat them; then I polished my teeth on the bone and buried it shallow—I must have a hundred bones around here, and I don't know why I save them. I never find them again unless accidentally, but I just can't stand leaving them around.

Afterwards I started to go over and see my friend, but there was nobody around except the little girl sitting in the swing and crying.

---

THE END

 

About the Author 

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), better known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American author of novels and short stories, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in an Irish middle class family. He is best known for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

The author was named after his famous second cousin, Francis Scott Key, who penned The Star Spangled Banner.

Fitzgerald's prolific short stories tend to center around the promise of youth, followed by the effects of age and despair. Fitzgerald was considered one of the best authors of the twentieth century, a leading voice for the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s and the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a great deal of his youth in Buffalo, New York, then moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. Fitzgerald dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 on the brink of World War I, but did not see combat. He became an officer, married, and after being decommissioned, went to New York City to pursue his literary career. This Side of Paradise was his first successful novel, allowing him to travel extensively in Paris and the French Riviera in the 1920s, creating the backdrop for his most widely-acclaimed work, The Great Gatsby which was published in 1925. He befriended great authors such as Ernest Hemingway during this period. Fitzgerald contributed stories to The Saturday Evening Post for most of his career. The first story in which his name appeared on the cover was Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920).

Fitzgerald was in poor health after spending most of his adulthood abusing alcohol and suffered three heart attacks. He died at the age of 44 in 1941.

Buy F Scott Fitzgerald Books at Amazon

A Snobbish Story by F Scott Fitzgerald

A Snobbish Story

by

F Scott Fitzgerald

---

Published in
Saturday Evening Post 29 November 1930

---

I.

It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries, because we are so strong and incorruptible ourselves, but our children's friends must show a blank service record. When young Josephine Perry was "removed" by her father from the Brereton School, where she had accidentally embraced a young man in the chapel, some of the best people in Chicago would have liked to have seen her drawn and quartered. But the Perrys were rich and powerful, so that friends rallied to their daughter's reputation—and Josephine's lovely face with its expression of just having led the children from a burning orphan asylum did the rest.

Certainly there was no consciousness of disgrace in it when she entered the grand stand at Lake Forest on the first day of the tennis tournament. Same old crowd, she seemed to say, turning, without any curiosity, half left, half right—not that I object, but you can't expect me to get excited.

It was a bright day, with the sun glittering on the crowd; the white figures on the courts threw no shadow. Over in Europe the bloody terror of the Somme was just beginning, but the war had become second-page news and the question agitating the crowd was who would win the tournament. Dresses were long and hats were small and tight, and America, shut in on itself, was bored beyond belief.

Josephine, representing in her own person the future, was not bored; she was merely impatient for a change. She gazed about until she found friends; they waved and she joined them. Only as she sat down did she realize that she was also next to a lady whose lips, in continual process of masking buck teeth, gave her a deceptively pleasant expression. Mrs. McRae belonged to the drawing-and-quartering party. She hated young people, and by some perverse instinct was drawn into contact with them, as organizer of the midsummer vaudeville at Lake Forest and of dancing classes in Chicago during the winter. She chose rich, plain girls and brought them along, bullying boys into dancing with them and comparing them to their advantage with the more popular black sheep—the most prominent representative of this flock being Josephine.

But Josephine was stiffened this afternoon by what her father had said the night before: "If Jenny McRae raises a finger against you, heaven help Jim." This was because of a rumor that Mrs. McRae, as an example for the public weal, was going to omit Josephine's usual dance with Travis de Coppet from the vaudeville that summer.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. McRae had, upon her husband's urgent appeal, reconsidered; she was one large, unconvincing smile. After a short but obvious conference behind her own eyes, she said:

"Do you see that young man on the second court, with the head-band?" And as Josephine gazed apathetically, "That's my nephew from Minneapolis. They say he has a fine chance to win here. I wonder if you'd be a sweet girl and be nice to him and introduce him to the young people."

Again she hesitated. "And I want to see you about the vaudeville soon. We expect you and Travis to do that marvelous, marvelous Maxixe for us."

Josephine's inner response was the monosyllable "Huh!"

She realized that she didn't want to be in the vaudeville, but only to be invited. And another look at Mrs. McRae's nephew decided her that the price was too high.

"The Maxixe is stale now," she answered, but her attention had already wandered. Someone was staring at her from near by, someone whose eyes burned disturbingly, like an uncharted light.

Turning to speak to Travis de Coppet, she could see the pale lower half of a face two rows behind, and during the burst of clapping at the end of a game she turned and made a cerebral photograph of the entire individual as her eyes wandered casually down the row.

He was a tall, even a high young man, with a rather small head set on enormous round shoulders. His face was pale; his eyes were nearly black, with an intense, passionate light in them; his mouth was sensitive and strongly set. He was poorly dressed—green shine on his suit, a shabby string of a necktie and a bum cap. When she turned he looked at her with rigid hunger, and kept looking at her after she had turned away, as if his eyes could burn loopholes through the thin straw of her hat.

Suddenly Josephine realized what a pleasant scene it was, and, relaxing, she listened to the almost regular pat-smack, smack-pat-pat of the balls, the thud of a jump and the overtone of the umpire's "Fault;" "Out;" "Game and set, 6-2, Mr. Oberwalter." The sun moved slowly westward off the games and gossip. The day's matches ended.

Rising, Mrs. McRae said to Josephine: "Then shall I bring Donald to you when he's dressed? He doesn't know a soul. I count on you. Where will you be?"

Josephine accepted the burden patiently: "I'll wait right here."

Already there was music on the outdoor platform beside the club, and there was a sound of clinking waiters as the crowd swayed out of the grand stand. Josephine refused to go and dance, and presently the three young men, each of whom had loved and lost her, moved on to other prospects, and Josephine picked them out presently below a fringe by their well-known feet—Travis de Coppet's deft, dramatic feet; Ed Bement's stern and uncompromising feet; Elsie Kerr's warped ankles; Lillian's new shoes; the high, button shoes of some impossible girl. There were more feet; the stands were almost empty now, and canvas was being spread over the lonely courts. She heard someone coming clumsily down the plank behind her and landing with a plunk upon the board on which she sat, lifting her an abrupt inch into the air.

"D' I jar you?"

It was the man she had noticed and forgotten. He was still very tall.

"Don't you go in for dancing?" he asked, lingering. "I picked you out for the belle of the ball."

"You're rather fresh, aren't you?"

"My error," he said. "I should have known you were too swell to be spoken to."

"I never saw you before."

"I never saw you either, but you looked so nice in your hat, and I saw you smiling to your friends, so I thought I'd take a chance."

"Like you do downstate, hey, Si?" retorted Josephine insolently.

"What's the matter with downstate? I come from Abe Lincoln's town, where the boys are big and brilliant."

"What are you—a dance-hall masher?"

He was extraordinarily handsome, and she liked his imperviousness to insult.

"Thanks. I'm a reporter—not sports, or society either. I came to do the atmosphere—you know, a fine day with the sun sizzling on high and all the sporting world as well as the fashionable world of Lake Forest out in force."

"Hadn't you better go along and write it then?"

"Finished; another fellow took it. Can I sit down for a minute, or do you soil easily? A mere breath of wind and poof! Listen, Miss Potterfield-Swiftcormick, or whatever your name is. I come from good people and I'm going to be a great writer some day." He sat down. "If anybody comes you can say I was interviewing you for the paper. What's your name?"

"Perry."

"Herbert T. Perry?"

She nodded and he looked at her hard for a moment.

"Well, well," he sighed, "most attractive girl I've met for months turns out to be Herbert T. Perry's daughter. As a rule, you society nuts aren't much to look at. I mean, you pass more pretty girls in the Loop in one hour than I've seen here this afternoon, and the ones here have the advantage of dressing and all that. What's your first name?"

She started to say "Miss," but suddenly it seemed pointless, and she answered "Josephine."

"My name's John Boynton Bailey." He handed her his card with CHICAGO TRIBUNE printed in the corner. "Let me inform you I'm the best reporter in this city. I've written a play that ought to be produced this fall. I'm telling you that to prove I'm not just some bum, as you may judge from my old clothes. I've got some better clothes home, but I didn't think I was going to meet you."

"I just thought you were sort of fresh to speak to me without being introduced."

"I take what I can get," he admitted moodily.

At the sudden droop of his mouth, thoughtful and unhappy, Josephine knew that she liked him. For a moment she did not want Mrs. McRae and her nephew to see her with him; then, abruptly, she did not care.

"It must be wonderful to write."

"I'm just getting started, but you'll be proud to know me sometime." He changed the subject. "You've got wonderful features—you know it? You know what features are—the eyes and the mouth together, not separately—the triangle they make. That's how people decide in a flash whether they like other people. A person's nose and shape of the face are just things he's born with and can't change. They don't matter, Miss Gotrocks."

"Please cut out the Stone Age slang."

"All right; but you've got nice features. Is your father good-looking?"

"Very," she answered, appreciating the compliment.

The music started again. Under the trees the wooden floor was red in the sun. Josephine sang softly:

"'Lisibeth Ann-n,
I'm wild a-bow-ow-out you, a-bow-ow-out you—"

"Nice here," he murmured. "Just this time of day and that music under the trees. It's hot in Chicago!"

She was singing to him; the remarked triangle of her eyes and mouth was turned on him, faintly and sadly smiling, her low voice wooed him casually from some impersonal necessity of its own. Realizing it, she broke off, saying: "I've got to go to the city tomorrow. I've been putting it off."

"I bet you have a lot of men worried about you."

"Me? I just sit home and twirl my thumbs all day."

"Yes, you do."

"Everybody hates me and I return the compliment, so I'm going into a convent or else to be a trained nurse in the war. Will you enlist in the French Army and let me nurse you?"

Her words died away; his eyes, following hers, saw Mrs. McRae and her nephew coming in at the gate. "I'll go now," he said quickly. "You wouldn't have lunch with me if you come to Chicago tomorrow? I'll take you to a German place with fine food."

She hesitated; Mrs. McRae's insincerely tickled expression grew larger on the near distance.

"All right."

He wrote swiftly on a piece of paper and handed it to her. Then, lifting his big body awkwardly, he gallumped down the tier of seats, receiving a quick but inquisitive glance from Mrs. McRae as he lumbered past her.

II.

It was easy to arrange. Josephine phoned the aunt with whom she was to lunch, dropped the chauffeur and, not without a certain breathlessness, approached Hoftzer's Rathskeller Garten on North State Street. She wore a blue crepe-de-chine dress sprinkled with soft brown leaves that were the color of her eyes.

John Boynton Bailey was waiting in front of the restaurant, looking distracted, yet protective, and Josephine's uneasiness departed.

He said, "We don't want to eat in this place. It seemed all right when I thought about it, but I just looked inside, and you might get sawdust in your shoes. We better go to some hotel."

Agreeably she turned in the direction of a hotel sacred to tea dancing, but he shook his head.

"You'd meet a lot of your friends. Let's go to the old La Grange."

The old La Grange Hotel, once the pride of the Middle West, was now a rendezvous of small-town transients and a forum for traveling salesmen. The women in the lobby were either hard-eyed types from the Loop or powderless, transpiring mothers from the Mississippi Valley. There were spittoons in patient activity and a busy desk where men mouthed cigars grotesquely and waited for telephone calls.

In the big dining room, John Bailey and Josephine ordered grapefruit, club sandwiches and julienne potatoes. Josephine put her elbows on the table and regarded him as if to say: "Well, now I'm temporarily yours; make the most of your time."

"You're the best-looking girl I ever met," he began. "Of course you're tangled up in all this bogus society hokum, but you can't help that. You think that's sour grapes, but I'll tell you; when I hear people bragging about their social position and who they are, and all that, I just sit back and laugh. Because I happen to be descended directly from Charlemagne. What do you think of that?"

Josephine blushed for him, and he grew a little ashamed of his statement and qualified it:

"But I believe in men, not their ancestors. I want to be the best writer in the world, that's all."

"I love good books," Josephine offered.

"It's the theater that interests me. I've got a play now that I think would go big if the managers would bother to read it. I've got all the stuff—sometimes I walk along the streets so full of it that I feel I could just sail out over the city like a balloon." His mouth drooped suddenly. "It's because I haven't got anything to show yet that I talk like that."

"Mr. Bailey, the great playwright. You'll send me tickets to your plays, won't you?"

"Sure," he said abstractedly, "but by that time you'll be married to some boy from Yale or Harvard with a couple of hundred neckties and a good-looking car, and you'll get to be dumbbell like the rest."

"I guess I am already—but I simply love poetry. Did you ever read 'The Passing of Arthur'?"

"There's more good poetry being written now right in Chi than during the whole last century. There's a man named Carl Sandburg that's as great as Shakespeare."

She was not listening; she was watching him. His sensitive face was glowing with the same strange light as when she had first seen him.

"I like poetry and music better than anything in the world," she said. "They're wonderful."

He believed her, knowing that she spoke of her liking for him. She felt that he was distinguished, and by this she meant something definite and real; the possession of some particular and special passion for life. She knew that she herself was superior in something to the girls who criticized her—though she often confused her superiority with the homage it inspired—and she was apathetic to the judgments of the crowd. The distinction that at fifteen she had found in Travis de Coppet's ballroom romantics she discovered now in John Bailey, in spite of his assertiveness and his snobbishness. She wanted to look at life through his glasses, since he found it so absorbing and exciting. Josephine had developed early and lived hard—if that can be said of one whose face was cousin to a fresh, damp rose—and she had begun to find men less than satisfactory. The strong ones were dull, the clever ones were shy, and all too soon they were responding to Josephine with a fatal sameness, a lack of temperament that blurred their personalities.

The club sandwiches arrived and absorbed them; there was activity from an orchestra placed up near the ceiling in the fashion of twenty years before. Josephine, chewing modestly, looked around the room; just across from them a man and woman were getting up from table, and she started and made one big swallow. The woman was what was called a peroxide blonde, with doll's eyes boldly drawn on a baby-pink face. The sugary perfume that exuded from her garish clothes was almost visible as she preceded her escort to the door. Her escort was Josephine's father.

"Don't you want your potatoes?" John Bailey asked after a minute.

"I think they're very good," she said in a strained voice.

Her father, the cherished ideal of her life—handsome, charming Herbert Perry. Her mother's lover—through so many summer evenings had Josephine seen them in the swinging settee of the veranda, with his head on her lap, smoothing his hair. It was the promise of happiness in her parents' marriage that brought a certain purposefulness into all Josephine's wayward seeking.

Now to see him lunching safely out of the zone of his friends with such a woman! It was different with boys—she rather admired their loud tales of conquest in the nether world, but for her father, a grown man, to be like that. She was trembling; a tear fell and glistened on a fried potato.

"Yes, I'd like very much to go there," she heard herself saying.

"Of course, they are all very serious people," he explained defensively. "I think they've decided to produce my play in their little theater. If they haven't I'll give one or two of them a good sock on the jaw, so that next time they strike any literature they'll recognize it."

In the taxi Josephine tried to put out of her mind what she had seen at the hotel. Her home, the placid haven from which she had made her forays, seemed literally in ruins, and she dreaded her return. Awful, awful, awful!

In a panic she moved close to John Bailey, with the necessity of being near something strong. The car stopped before a new building of yellow stucco from which a blue-jowled, fiery-eyed young man came out.

"Well, what happened?" John demanded.

"The trap dropped at 11:30."

"Yes?"

"I wrote out his farewell speech like he asked me to, but he took too long and they wouldn't let him finish it."

"What a dirty trick on you."

"Wasn't it? Who's your friend?" The man indicated Josephine.

"Lake Forest stuff," said John, grinning. "Miss Perry, Mr. Blacht."

"Here for the triumph of the Springfield Shakespeare? But I hear they may do Uncle Tom's Cabin instead." He winked at Josephine. "So long."

"What did he mean?" she demanded as they went on.

"Why, he's on the Tribune and he had to cover a hanging this morning. What's more, he and I caught the fellow ourselves. Do you think these cops ever catch anybody?"

"This isn't a jail, is it?"

"Lord, no; this is the theater workshop."

"What did he mean about a speech?"

"He wrote the man a dying speech to sort of make up for having caught him."

"How perfectly hectic!" cried Josephine, awed.

They were in a long, dimly lit hall with a stage at one end; upon it, standing about in the murkiness of a few footlights, were a dozen people. Almost at once Josephine realized that everybody there except herself was crazy. She knew it incontrovertibly, although the only person of outward eccentricity was a robust woman in a frock coat and gray morning trousers. And in spite of the fact that of those present seven were later to attain notoriety, and four, actual distinction, Josephine was, for the moment, right. It was their intolerable inadjustability to their surroundings that had plucked them from lonely normal schools, from the frame rows of Midwestern towns and the respectability of shoddy suburbs, and brought them to Chicago in 1916—ignorant, wild with energy, doggedly sensitive and helplessly romantic, wanderers like their pioneer ancestors upon the face of the land.

"This is Miss—," said John Bailey, "and Mrs.—and Caroline—and Mr.—and—"

Their frightened eyes lifted to the young girl's elegant clothes, her confident, beautiful face, and they turned from her rudely in self-protection. Then gradually they came toward her, hinting of their artistic or economic ideals, naive as freshmen, unreticent as Rotarians. All but one, a handsome girl with a dirty neck and furtive eyes—eyes which, from the moment of Josephine's entrance, never left her face. Josephine listened to a flow of talk, rapt of expression, but only half comprehending and thinking often with sharp pain of her father. Her mind wandered to Lake Forest as if it were a place she had left long ago, and she heard the crack-pat-crack of the tennis balls in the still afternoon. Presently the people sat down on kitchen chairs and a gray-haired poet took the floor.

"The meeting of the committee this morning was to decide on our first production. There was some debate. Miss Hammerton's drama"—he bowed in the direction of the trousered lady—"received serious consideration, but since one of our benefactors is opposed to representations of the class war, we have postponed consideration of Miss Hammerton's powerful play until later."

At this point Josephine was startled to hear Miss Hammerton say "Boo!" in a large, angry voice, give a series of groans, varied as if to express the groans of many people—then clap on a soft gray hat and stride angrily from the room.

"Elsie takes it hard," said the chairman. "Unhappily, the benefactor I spoke of, whose identity you have doubtless guessed, is adamant on the subject—a thorough reactionary. So your committee have unanimously voted that our production shall be 'Race Riot', by John Boynton Bailey."

Josephine gasped congratulations. In the applause the girl with the furtive eyes brought her chair over and sat down beside Josephine.

"You live at Lake Forest," she said challengingly.

"In the summer."

"Do you know Emily Kohl?"

"No, I don't."

"I thought you were from Lake Forest."

"I live at Lake Forest," said Josephine, still pleasantly, "but I don't know Emily Kohl."

Rebuffed only for a moment, the girl continued, "I don't suppose all this means much to you."

"It's a sort of dramatic club, isn't it?" said Josephine.

"Dramatic club! Oh, gosh!" cried the girl. "Did you hear that? She thinks it's a dramatic club, like Miss Pinkerton's school." In a moment her uninfectious laughter died away, and she turned to the playwright. "How about it? Have you picked your cast?"

"Not yet," he said shortly, annoyed at the baiting of Josephine.

"I suppose you'll have Mrs. Fiske coming on from New York," the girl continued. "Come on, we're all on pins and needles. Who's going to be in it?"

"I'll tell you one thing, Evelyn. You're not."

She grew red with astonishment and anger. "Oho! When did you decide that?"

"Some time ago."

"Oho! How about all the lines I gave you for Clare?"

"I'll cut them tonight; there were only three. I'd rather not produce the thing than have you play Clare."

The others were listening now.

"Far be it from me," the girl began, her voice trembling a little, "far be it from me—"

Josephine saw that John Bailey's face was even whiter than usual. His mouth was hard and cold. Suddenly the girl got up, cried out, "You fool!" and hurried from the room.

With this second temperamental departure a certain depression settled on those remaining; presently the meeting broke up, convoked for next day.

"Let's take a walk," John said to Josephine as they came out into a different afternoon; the heat had lifted with the first breeze from Lake Michigan.

"Let's take a walk," John repeated. "That made me sort of sick—her talking to you like that."

"I didn't like her, but now I'm sorry for her. Who is she?"

"She's a newspaper woman," he answered vaguely. "Listen. How would you like to be in this play?"

"Oh, I couldn't—I've got to be in a play out at the Lake."

"Society stuff," he said, scornfully mimicking: "'Here come the jolly, jolly golfing girls. Maybe they'll sing us a song.' If you want to be in this thing of mine you can have the lead."

"But how do you know I could act?"

"Come on! With that voice of yours? Listen. The girl in the play is like you. This race riot is caused by two men, one black and one white. The black man is fed up with his black wife and in love with a high-yellow girl, and that makes him bitter, see? And the white man married too young and he's in the same situation. When they both get their domestic affairs straightened the race riot dies down, too, see?"

"It's very original," said Josephine breathlessly. "Which would I be?"

"You'd be the girl the married man was in love with."

"Is that the part that girl was going to play?"

"Yes." He frowned, and then added, "She's my wife."

"Oh—you're married?"

"I married young—like the man in my play. In one way it isn't so bad, because neither of us believed in the old-fashioned bourgeois marriage, living in the same apartment and all. She kept her own name. But we got to hate each other anyhow."

After the first shock was over, it did not seem so strange to Josephine that he was married; there had been a day two years before when only the conscientiousness of a rural justice had prevented Josephine from becoming Mrs. Travis de Coppet.

"We all get what's coming to us," he remarked.

They turned up the boulevard, passing the Blackstone, where faint dance music clung about the windows.

On the street the plate glass of a hundred cars, bound for the country or the North Shore, took the burning sunset, but the city would make shift without them, and Josephine's imagination rested here instead of following the cars; she thought of electric fans in little restaurants with lobsters on ice in the windows, and of pearly signs glittering and revolving against the obscure, urban sky, the hot, dark sky. And pervading everything, a terribly strange, brooding mystery of roof tops and empty apartments, of white dresses in the paths of parks, and fingers for stars and faces instead of moons, and people with strange people scarcely knowing one another's names.

A sensuous shiver went over Josephine, and she knew that the fact that John Bailey was married simply added to his attraction for her. Life broke up a little; barred and forbidden doors swung open, unmasking enchanted corridors. Was it that which drew her father, some call to adventure that she had from him?

"I wish there was some place we could go and be alone together," John Bailey said, and suddenly, "I wish I had a car."

But they were already alone, she thought. She had spun him out a background now that was all his—the summer streets of the city. They were alone here; when he kissed her, finally, they would be less alone. That would be his time; this was hers. Their mutually clinging arms pulled her close to his tall side.

A little later, sitting in the back of a movie with the yellow clock in the corner creeping fatally toward six, she leaned into the hollow of his rounded shoulder and his cool white cheek bent down to hers.

"I'm letting myself in for a lot of suffering," he whispered. She saw his black eyes thinking in the darkness and met them reassuringly with hers.

"I take things pretty hard," he went on. "And what in hell could we ever be to each other?"

She didn't answer. Instead she let the familiar lift and float and flow of love close around them, pulling him back from his far-away uniqueness with the pressure of her hand.

"What will your wife think if I take that part in your play?" she whispered.

***

At the same moment Josephine's wayward parent was being met by her mother at the Lake Forest Station.

"It's deathly hot in town," he said. "What a day!"

"Did you see her?"

"Yes, and after one look I took her to the La Grange for lunch. I wanted to preserve a few shreds of my reputation."

"Is it settled?"

"Yes. She's agreed to leave Will alone and stop using his name for three hundred a month for life. I wired your highly discriminating brother in Hawaii that he can come home."

"Poor Will," sighed Mrs. Perry.

III.

Three days later, in the cool of the evening, Josephine spoke to her father as he came out on the veranda.

"Daddy, do you want to back a play?"

"I never thought about it. I'd always thought I'd like to write one. Is Jenny McRae's vaudeville on the rocks?"

Josephine ticked impatiently with her tongue. "I'm not even going to be in the vaudeville. I'm talking about an attempt to do something fine. What I want to ask is: What would be your possible objections to backing it?"

"My objections?"

"What would they be?"

"You haven't given me time to drum up any."

"I should think you'd want to do something decent with your money."

"What's the play?" He sat down beside her, and she moved just slightly away from him.

"Mother knows some of the patronesses and it's absolutely all right. But the man who was going to be the backer is very narrow and wants to make a lot of changes that would ruin the whole thing; so they want to find another backer."

"What's it about?"

"Oh, the play's all right, don't you worry," she assured him. "The man that wrote it is still alive, but the play is a part of English literature."

He considered. "Well, if you're going to be in it, and your mother thinks it all right, I'd put up a couple of hundred."

"A couple of hundred!" she exclaimed. "A man who goes around throwing away his money like you do! They need at least a thousand."

"Throwing away my money?" he repeated. "What on earth are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about." It seemed to her that he winced slightly, that his voice was uncertain as he said:

"If you mean the way we live, it doesn't seem quite tactful to reproach me about that."

"I don't mean that." Josephine hesitated; then without premeditation took a sudden plunge into blackmail: "I should think you'd rather not have me soil my hands by discussing—"

Mrs. Perry's footsteps sounded in the hall, and Josephine rose quickly. The car rolled up the drive.

"I hope you'll go to bed early," her mother said.

"Lillian and some kids are coming over."

Josephine and her father exchanged a short, hostile glance before the machine drove off.

It was a harvest night, bright enough to read by. Josephine sat on the veranda steps listening to the tossing of sleepless birds, the rattle of a last dish in the kitchen, the sad siren of the Chicago-Milwaukee train. Composed and tranquil, she sat waiting for the telephone; he could not see her there, so she saw herself for him—it was almost the same.

She considered the immediate future in all its gorgeous possibilities—the first night, with the audience whispering: "Do you realize that's the Perry girl?" With the final curtain, tumultuous applause and herself, with arms full of flowers, leading forth a tall, shy man who would say: "I owe it all to her." And Mrs. McRae's furious face in the audience, and the remorseful face of Miss Brereton, of the Brereton School, who happened to be in town. "Had I but known her genius, I wouldn't have acted as I did." Comments jubilant and uproarious from every side: "The greatest young actress on the American stage!"

Then the move to a larger theater; great, staring, electric letters, JOSEPHINE PERRY IN RACE RIOT. "No, father, I'm not going back to school. This is my education and my debut." And her father's answer:

"Well, little girl, I'll have to admit it was a lucky speculation for me to put up that money."

If the figure of John Bailey became a little dim during the latter part of this reverie, it was because the reverie itself opened out to vaguer and vaguer horizons, to return always to that opening night from which it started once more.

Lillian, Travis and Ed came, but she was hardly aware of them, listening for the telephone. They sat, as they had so often, in a row on the steps, surrounded, engulfed, drowned in summer. But they were growing up and the pattern was breaking; they were absorbed in secret destinies of their own, no matter how friendly their voices or how familiar their laughter in the silence. Josephine's boredom with a discussion of the tournament turned to irascibility; she told Travis de Coppet that he smelled of onions.

"I won't eat any onions when we rehearse for the vaudeville," he said.

"You won't be rehearsing with me, because I'm not being in it. I've got a little tired of 'Here come the jolly golfing girls. Hurray!'"

The phone rang and she excused herself.

"Are you alone?"

"There're some people here—that I've known all my life."

"Don't kiss anybody. I don't mean that—go kiss anybody you want to."

"I don't want to." She felt her own lips' warmth in the mouthpiece of the phone.

"I'm out in a pay station. She came up to my room in a crazy humor and I got out."

Josephine didn't answer; something went out of her when he spoke of his wife.

When she went back on the porch her guests, sensing her abstraction, were on their feet.

"No. We want to go. You bore us too."

Her parents' car pursued Ed's around the circular drive. Her father motioned that he wanted to see her alone.

"I didn't quite understand about my spending my money. Is this a Socialist bunch?"

"I told you that mother knew some of the—"

"But who is it you know? The fellow who wrote the play?"

"Yes."

"Where did you meet him?"

"Just around."

"He asked you to raise the money?"

"No."

"I'd certainly like to have a talk with him before you go into this any further. Invite him out to luncheon Saturday?"

"All right," she agreed unwillingly. "If you don't taunt him about his poverty and his ragged clothes."

"What a thing to accuse me of!"

It was with a deep uneasiness that, next Saturday, Josephine drove her roadster to the station. She was relieved to see that he had had a haircut, and he looked very big and powerful and distinguished among the tennis crowd as he got off the train. But finding him nervous, she drove around Lake Forest for half an hour.

"Whose house is that?" he kept asking. "Who are these two people you just spoke to?"

"Oh, I don't know; just somebody. There'll be nobody at lunch, but the family and a boy named Howard Page I've known for years."

"These boys you've known for years," he sighed. "Why wasn't I one?"

"But you don't want to be that. You want to be the best writer in the world."

In the Perrys' living room John Bailey stared at a photograph of bridesmaids at her sister's wedding the previous summer. Then Howard Page, a junior at New Haven, arrived and they talked of the tennis: Mrs. McRae's nephew had done brilliantly and was conceded a chance in the finals this afternoon. When Mrs. Perry came downstairs, just before luncheon, John Bailey could not help turning his back on her suddenly and walking up and down to pretend he was at home. He knew in his heart he was better than these people, and he couldn't bear that they should not know it.

The maid called him to the telephone, and Josephine overheard him say, "I can't help it. You have no right to call me here." It was because of the existence of his wife that she had not let him kiss her, but had fitted him, instead, into her platonic reverie, which should endure until Providence set him free.

At luncheon she was relieved to see John Bailey and her father take a liking to each other. John was expert and illuminating about the race riots, and she saw how thin and meager Howard Page was beside him.

Again John Bailey was summoned to the phone; this time he left the room with an exclamation, said three words into the mouthpiece and hung up with a sharp click.

Back at table, he whispered to Josephine: "Will you tell the maid to say I'm gone if she calls again?"

Josephine was in argument with her mother: "I don't see the use of coming out if I could be an actress instead."

"Why should she come out?" her father agreed. "Hasn't she done enough rushing around?"

"But certainly she's to finish school. There's a course in dramatic art and every year they give a play."

"What do they give?" demanded Josephine scornfully. "Shakespeare or something like that! Do you realize there are at least a dozen poets right here in Chicago that are better than Shakespeare?"

John Bailey demurred with a laugh. "Oh, no. One maybe."

"I think a dozen," insisted the eager convert.

"In Billy Phelps' course at Yale—" began Howard Page, but Josephine said vehemently:

"Anyhow, I don't think you ought to wait till people are dead before you recognize them. Like mother does."

"I do no such thing," objected Mrs. Perry. "Did I say that, Howard?"

"In Billy Phelps' course at Yale—" began Howard again, but this time Mr. Perry interrupted:

"We're getting off the point. This young man wants my daughter in his play. If there's nothing disgraceful in the play I don't object."

"In Billy—"

"But I don't want Josephine in anything sordid."

"Sordid!" Josephine glared at him. "Don't you think there are plenty of sordid things right here in Lake Forest, for instance?"

"But they don't touch you," her father said.

"Don't they, though?"

"No," he said firmly. "Nothing sordid touches you. If it does, then it's your own fault." He turned to John Bailey. "I understand you need money."

John flushed. "We do. But don't think—"

"That's all right. We've stood behind the opera here for many years and I'm not afraid of things simply because they're new. We know some women on your committee and I don't suppose they'd stand for any nonsense. How much do you need?"

"About two thousand dollars."

"Well, you raise half and I'll raise half—on two conditions: First, my name kept entirely out of it and my daughter's name not played up in any way; second, you assure me personally that she doesn't play any questionable part or have any speeches to make that might offend her mother."

John Bailey considered. "That last is a large order," he said. "I don't know what would offend her mother. There wouldn't be any cursing to do, for instance. There's not a bit in the whole damn play."

He flushed slowly at their laughter.

"Nothing sordid is going to touch Josephine unless she steps into it herself," said Mr. Perry.

"I see your point," John Bailey said.

Lunch was over. For some moments Mrs. Perry had been glancing toward the hall, where some loud argument was taking place.

"Shall we—"

They had scarcely crossed the threshold of the living room when the maid appeared, followed by a local personage in a vague uniform of executive blue.

"Hello, Mr. Kelly. You going to take us into custody?"

Kelly hesitated awkwardly. "Is there a Mr. Bailey?"

John, who had wandered off, swung about sharply. "What?"

"There's an important message for you. They've been trying to get you here, but they couldn't, so they telephoned the constable—that's me." He beckoned him, and then, talking to him, tried at the same time to urge him, with nods of his head, toward the privacy of outdoors; his voice, though lowered, was perfectly audible to everybody in the room.

"The St. Anthony's Hospital—your wife slashed both her wrists and turned the gas on—they want you as soon as you can get there." The voice pitched higher as they went through the door: "They don't know yet—If there's no train, you can get a car—" They were both outside now, walking fast down the path. Josephine saw John trip and grasp clumsily at the edge that bordered the gate, and then go on with great strides toward the constable's flivver. The constable was running to keep up with him.

IV.

After a few minutes, when John Bailey's trouble had died away in the distance, they all stopped being stunned and behaved like people again. Mr. and Mrs. Perry were panicky as to how far Josephine was involved; then they became angry at John Bailey for coming there with disaster hanging over him.

Mr. Perry demanded: "Did you know he was married?"

Josephine was crying; her mouth was drawn; he looked away from her.

"They lived separately," she whispered.

"She seemed to know he was out here."

"Of course he's a newspaperman," said her mother, "so he can probably keep it out of the papers. Or do you think you ought to do something, Herbert?"

"I was just wondering."

Howard Page got up awkwardly, not wanting to say he was now going to the tennis finals. Mr. Perry went to the door and talked earnestly for a few minutes, and Howard nodded.

Half an hour passed. Several callers drifted by in cars, but received word that no one was at home. Josephine felt something throbbing on the heat of the summer afternoon; and at first she thought it was pity and then remorse, but finally she knew what the throbbing was. "I must push this thing away from me," it said; "this thing must not touch me. I hardly met his wife. He told me—"

And now John Bailey began slipping away. Who was he but a chance encounter, someone who had spoken to her a week before about a play he had written? He had nothing to do with her.

At four o'clock Mr. Perry went to the phone and called St. Anthony's Hospital; only when he asked for an official whom he knew did he get the information: In the actual face of death, Mrs. Bailey had phoned for the police, and it now seemed that they had reached her in time. She had lost blood, but barring complications—

Now, in the relief, the parents grew angry with Josephine as with a child who has toddled under galloping horses.

"What I can't understand is why you should have to know people like that. Is it necessary to go into the back streets of Chicago?"

"That young man had no business here," her father thundered grimly, "and he knew it."

"But who was he?" wailed Mrs. Perry.

"He told me he was a descendant of Charlemagne," said Josephine.

Mr. Perry grunted. "Well, we want no more of Charlemagne's descendants here. Young people had better stay with their own kind until they can distinguish one from another. You let married men alone."

But now Josephine was herself again. She stood up, her eyes hardening.

"Oh, you make me sick," she cried—"a married man! As if there weren't a lot of married men who met other women besides their wives."

Unable to bear another scene, Mrs. Perry withdrew. Once she was out of hearing, Josephine came out into the open at last: "You're a fine one to talk to me."

"Now look here; you said that the other night, and I don't like it now any better than I did then. What do you mean?"

"I suppose you've never been to lunch with anybody at the La Grange Hotel."

"The La Grange—" The truth broke over him slowly. "Why—" He began laughing. Then he swore suddenly, and going quickly to the foot of the stairs, called his wife.

"You sit down," he said to Josephine. "I'm going to tell you a story."

Half an hour later Miss Josephine Perry left her house and set off for the tennis tournament. She wore one of the new autumn gowns with the straight line, but having a looped effect at the sides of the skirt, and fluffy white cuffs. Some people she met just outside the stands told her that Mrs. McRae's nephew was weakening to the veteran, and this started her thinking of Mrs. McRae and of her decision about the vaudeville with a certain regret. People would think it odd if she wasn't in it.

There was a sudden burst of wild clapping as she went in; the tournament was over. The crowd was swarming around victor and vanquished in the central court, and gravitating with it, she was swept by an eddy to the very front of it, until she was face to face with Mrs. McRae's nephew himself. But she was equal to the occasion. With her most sad and melting smile, as if she had hoped for him from day to day, she held out her hand and spoke to him in her clear, vibrant voice:

"We are all awfully sorry."

For a moment, even in the midst of the excited crowd, a hushed silence fell. Modestly, conscious of her personality, Josephine backed away, aware that he was staring after her, his mouth stupidly open, aware of a burst of laughter around her. Travis de Coppet appeared beside her.

"Well, of all the nuts!" he cried.

"What's the matter? What—"

"Sorry! Why, he won! It was the greatest come-back I ever saw."

---

So, at the vaudeville, Josephine sat with her family after all. Looking around during the show, she saw John Bailey standing in the rear. He looked very sad, and she felt very sorry, realizing that he had come in hopes of a glimpse of her. He would see, at least, that she was not up there on the stage debasing herself with such inanities.

Then she caught her breath as the lights changed, the music quickened and at the head of the steps, Travis de Coppet in white-satin football suit swung into the spotlight a shimmering blonde in a dress of autumn leaves. It was Madelaine Danby, and it was the role Josephine would have played. With the warm rain of intimate applause, Josephine decided something: That any value she might have was in the immediate, shimmering present—and thus thinking, she threw in her lot with the rich and powerful of this world forever.

---

THE END

 

 

 

About the Author 

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), better known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American author of novels and short stories, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in an Irish middle class family. He is best known for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

The author was named after his famous second cousin, Francis Scott Key, who penned The Star Spangled Banner.

Fitzgerald's prolific short stories tend to center around the promise of youth, followed by the effects of age and despair. Fitzgerald was considered one of the best authors of the twentieth century, a leading voice for the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s and the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a great deal of his youth in Buffalo, New York, then moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. Fitzgerald dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 on the brink of World War I, but did not see combat. He became an officer, married, and after being decommissioned, went to New York City to pursue his literary career. This Side of Paradise was his first successful novel, allowing him to travel extensively in Paris and the French Riviera in the 1920s, creating the backdrop for his most widely-acclaimed work, The Great Gatsby which was published in 1925. He befriended great authors such as Ernest Hemingway during this period. Fitzgerald contributed stories to The Saturday Evening Post for most of his career. The first story in which his name appeared on the cover was Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920).

Fitzgerald was in poor health after spending most of his adulthood abusing alcohol and suffered three heart attacks. He died at the age of 44 in 1941.

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