This Side of Paradise
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Part 6 out of 6



"Night clerk saw you go up-stairs with this woman."

Amory nodded; Jill reappeared from the bathroom, completely if rather
untidily arrayed.

"Now then," began Olson, producing a note-book, "I want your real names--
no damn John Smith or Mary Brown."

"Wait a minute," said Amory quietly. "Just drop that big-bully stuff.
We merely got caught, that's all."

Olson glared at him.

"Name?" he snapped.

Amory gave his name and New York address.

"And the lady?"

"Miss Jill--"

"Say," cried Olson indignantly, "just ease up on the nursery rhymes.
What's your name? Sarah Murphy? Minnie Jackson?"

"Oh, my God!" cried the girl cupping her tear-stained face in her hands.
"I don't want my mother to know. I don't want my mother to know."

"Come on now!"

"Shut up!" cried Amory at Olson.

An instant's pause.

"Stella Robbins," she faltered finally. "General Delivery, Rugway,
New Hampshire."

Olson snapped his note-book shut and looked at them very ponderously.

"By rights the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police and you'd
go to penitentiary, you would, for bringin' a girl from one State to
'nother f'r immoral purp'ses--" He paused to let the majesty of his
words sink in. "But--the hotel is going to let you off."

"It doesn't want to get in the papers," cried Jill fiercely. "Let us
off! Huh!"

A great lightness surrounded Amory. He realized that he was safe and
only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he might have
incurred.

"However," continued Olson, "there's a protective association among the
hotels. There's been too much of this stuff, and we got a 'rangement
with the newspapers so that you get a little free publicity. Not the
name of the hotel, but just a line sayin' that you had a little trouble
in 'lantic City. See?"

"I see."

"You're gettin' off light--damn light--but--"

"Come on," said Amory briskly. "Let's get out of here. We don't need a
valedictory."

Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at Alec's
still form. Then he extinguished the lights and motioned them to follow
him. As they walked into the elevator Amory considered a piece of
bravado--yielded finally. He reached out and tapped Olson on the arm.

"Would you mind taking off your hat? There's a lady in the elevator."

Olson's hat came off slowly. There was a rather embarrassing two minutes
under the lights of the lobby while the night clerk and a few belated
guests stared at them curiously; the loudly dressed girl with bent head,
the handsome young man with his chin several points aloft; the inference
was quite obvious. Then the chill outdoors--where the salt air was
fresher and keener still with the first hints of morning.

"You can get one of those taxis and beat it," said Olson, pointing to
the blurred outline of two machines whose drivers were presumably asleep
inside.

"Good-by," said Olson. He reached in his pocket suggestively, but Amory
snorted, and, taking the girl's arm, turned away.

"Where did you tell the driver to go?" she asked as they whirled along
the dim street.

"The station."

"If that guy writes my mother--"

"He won't. Nobody'll ever know about this--except our friends and
enemies."

Dawn was breaking over the sea.

"It's getting blue," she said.

"It does very well," agreed Amory critically, and then as an after-
thought: "It's almost breakfast-time--do you want something to eat?"

"Food--" she said with a cheerful laugh. "Food is what queered the
party. We ordered a big supper to be sent up to the room about two
o'clock. Alec didn't give the waiter a tip, so I guess the little
bastard snitched."

Jill's low spirits seemed to have gone faster than the scattering night.
"Let me tell you," she said emphatically, "when you want to stage that
sorta party stay away from liquor, and when you want to get tight stay
away from bedrooms."

"I'll remember."

He tapped suddenly at the glass and they drew up at the door of an
all-night restaurant.

"Is Alec a great friend of yours?" asked Jill as they perched themselves
on high stools inside, and set their elbows on the dingy counter.

"He used to be. He probably won't want to be any more--and never
understand why."

"It was sorta crazy you takin' all that blame. Is he pretty important?
Kinda more important than you are?"

Amory laughed.

"That remains to be seen," he answered. "That's the question."

* * * *

THE COLLAPSE OF SEVERAL PILLARS

Two days later back in New York Amory found in a newspaper what he had
been searching for--a dozen lines which announced to whom it might
concern that Mr. Amory Blaine, who "gave his address" as, etc., had been
requested to leave his hotel in Atlantic City because of entertaining
in his room a lady _not_ his wife.

Then he started, and his fingers trembled, for directly above was a
longer paragraph of which the first words were:

"Mr. and Mrs. Leland R. Connage are announcing the engagement of their
daughter, Rosalind, to Mr. J. Dawson Ryder, of Hartford, Connecticut--"

He dropped the paper and lay down on his bed with a frightened, sinking
sensation in the pit of his stomach. She was gone, definitely, finally
gone. Until now he had half unconsciously cherished the hope deep in his
heart that some day she would need him and send for him, cry that it had
been a mistake, that her heart ached only for the pain she had caused
him. Never again could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting her--
not this Rosalind, harder, older--nor any beaten, broken woman that his
imagination brought to the door of his forties--Amory had wanted her
youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was
selling now once and for all. So far as he was concerned, young Rosalind
was dead.

A day later came a crisp, terse letter from Mr. Barton in Chicago,
which informed him that as three more street-car companies had gone
into the hands of receivers he could expect for the present no further
remittances. Last of all, on a dazed Sunday night, a telegram told him
of Monsignor Darcy's sudden death in Philadelphia five days before.

He knew then what it was that he had perceived among the curtains of the
room in Atlantic City.




BOOK TWO

The Education of a Personage

CHAPTER 5

The Egotist Becomes a Personage


"A fathom deep in sleep I lie
With old desires, restrained before,
To clamor lifeward with a cry,
As dark flies out the greying door;
And so in quest of creeds to share
I seek assertive day again . . .
But old monotony is there:
Endless avenues of rain.

Oh, might I rise again! Might I
Throw off the heat of that old wine,
See the new morning mass the sky
With fairy towers, line on line;
Find each mirage in the high air
A symbol, not a dream again . . .
But old monotony is there:
Endless avenues of rain."


Under the glass portcullis of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first
great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the
sidewalk. The air became gray and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly
outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more
danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded
skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxi-cabs sent
out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome
November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it
with that ancient fence, the night.

The silence of the theatre behind him ended with a curious snapping sound,
followed by the heavy roaring of a rising crowd and the interlaced
clatter of many voices. The matinee was over.

He stood aside, edged a little into the rain to let the throng pass.
A small boy rushed out, sniffed in the damp, fresh air and turned up the
collar of his coat; came three or four couples in a great hurry; came
a further scattering of people whose eyes as they emerged glanced
invariably, first at the wet street, then at the rain-filled air, finally
at the dismal sky; last a dense, strolling mass that depressed him with
its heavy odor compounded of the tobacco smell of the men and the fetid
sensuousness of stale powder on women. After the thick crowd came
another scattering; a stray half-dozen; a man on crutches; finally the
rattling bang of folding seats inside announced that the ushers were at
work.

New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed.
Pallid men rushed by, pinching together their coat-collars; a great swarm
of tired, magpie girls from a department-store crowded along with shrieks
of strident laughter, three to an umbrella; a squad of marching policemen
passed, already miraculously protected by oilskin capes.

The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment, and the numerous unpleasant
aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening
procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway--the car
cards thrusting themselves at one, leering out like dull bores who grab
your arm with another story; the querulous worry as to whether some one
isn't leaning on you; a man deciding not to give his seat to a woman,
hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a
squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the
smells of the food men ate--at best just people--too hot or too cold,
tired, worried.

He pictured the rooms where these people lived--where the patterns of
the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on green and
yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways
and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings; where even
love dressed as seduction--a sordid murder around the corner, illicit
motherhood in the flat above. And always there was the economical
stuffiness of indoor winter, and the long summers, nightmares of
perspiration between sticky enveloping walls . . . dirty restaurants
where careless, tired people helped themselves to sugar with their own
used coffee-spoons, leaving hard brown deposits in the bowl.

It was not so bad where there were only men or else only women; it was
when they were vilely herded that it all seemed so rotten. It was some
shame that women gave off at having men see them tired and poor--it was
some disgust that men had for women who were tired and poor. It was
dirtier than any battle-field he had seen, harder to contemplate than
any actual hardship moulded of mire and sweat and danger, it was an
atmosphere wherein birth and marriage and death were loathsome, secret
things.

He remembered one day in the subway when a delivery boy had brought in a
great funeral wreath of fresh flowers, how the smell of it had suddenly
cleared the air and given every one in the car a momentary glow.

"I detest poor people," thought Amory suddenly. "I hate them for being
poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it's rotten now.
It's the ugliest thing in the world. It's essentially cleaner to be
corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor." He seemed to see
again a figure whose significance had once impressed him--a well-dressed
young man gazing from a club window on Fifth Avenue and saying something
to his companion with a look of utter disgust. Probably, thought Amory,
what he said was: "My God! Aren't people horrible!"

Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people. He thought
cynically how completely he was lacking in all human sympathy. O. Henry
had found in these people romance, pathos, love, hate--Amory saw only
coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity. He made no self-accusations:
never any more did he reproach himself for feelings that were natural and
sincere. He accepted all his reactions as a part of him, unchangeable,
unmoral. This problem of poverty transformed, magnified, attached to
some grander, more dignified attitude might some day even be his problem;
at present it roused only his profound distaste.

He walked over to Fifth Avenue, dodging the blind, black menace of
umbrellas, and standing in front of Delmonico's hailed an auto-bus.
Buttoning his coat closely around him he climbed to the roof, where he
rode in solitary state through the thin, persistent rain, stung into
alertness by the cool moisture perpetually reborn on his cheek.
Somewhere in his mind a conversation began, rather resumed its place in
his attention. It was composed not of two voices, but of one, which
acted alike as questioner and answerer:

Question.--Well--what's the situation?

Answer.--That I have about twenty-four dollars to my name.

Q.--You have the Lake Geneva estate.

A.--But I intend to keep it.

Q.--Can you live?

A.--I can't imagine not being able to. People make money in books and
I've found that I can always do the things that people do in books.
Really they are the only things I can do.

Q.--Be definite.

A.--I don't know what I'll do--nor have I much curiosity. To-morrow I'm
going to leave New York for good. It's a bad town unless you're on top
of it.

Q.--Do you want a lot of money?

A.--No. I am merely afraid of being poor.

Q.--Very afraid?

A.--Just passively afraid.

Q.--Where are you drifting?

A.--Don't ask _me!_

Q.--Don't you care?

A.--Rather. I don't want to commit moral suicide.

Q.--Have you no interests left?

A.--None. I've no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives
off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of
virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness.

Q.--An interesting idea.

A.--That's why a "good man going wrong" attracts people. They stand
around and literally _warm themselves_ at the calories of virtue he gives
off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in
delight--"How _innocent_ the poor child is!" They're warming themselves
at her virtue. But Sarah sees the simper and never makes that remark
again. Only she feels a little colder after that.

Q.--All your calories gone?

A.--All of them. I'm beginning to warm myself at other people's virtue.

Q.--Are you corrupt?

A.--I think so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about good and evil at all
any more.

Q.--Is that a bad sign in itself?

A.--Not necessarily.

Q.--What would be the test of corruption?

A.--Becoming really insincere--calling myself "not such a bad fellow,"
thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of
losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists
think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they
ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over
again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood--she wants to
repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the
pleasure of losing it again.

Q.--Where are you drifting?

This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind's most familiar state--
a grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior impressions and
physical reactions.

One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street--or One Hundred and Thirty-seventh
Street. . . . Two and three look alike--no, not much. Seat damp . . .
are clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat absorbing dryness from
clothes? . . . Sitting on wet substance gave appendicitis, so Froggy
Parker's mother said. Well, he'd had it--I'll sue the steamboat company,
Beatrice said, and my uncle has a quarter interest--did Beatrice go to
heaven? . . . probably not-- He represented Beatrice's immortality,
also love-affairs of numerous dead men who surely had never thought of
him . . . if it wasn't appendicitis, influenza maybe. What? One Hundred
and Twentieth Street? That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth back
there. One O Two instead of One Two Seven. Rosalind not like Beatrice,
Eleanor like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier. Apartments along
here expensive--probably hundred and fifty a month--maybe two hundred.
Uncle had only paid hundred a month for whole great big house in
Minneapolis. Question--were the stairs on the left or right as you
came in? Anyway, in 12 Univee they were straight back and to the left.
What a dirty river--want to go down there and see if it's dirty--French
rivers all brown or black, so were Southern rivers. Twenty-four dollars
meant four hundred and eighty doughnuts. He could live on it three
months and sleep in the park. Wonder where Jill was--Jill Bayne, Fayne,
Sayne--what the devil--neck hurts, darned uncomfortable seat. No desire
to sleep with Jill, what could Alec see in her? Alec had a coarse taste
in women. Own taste the best; Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor,
were all-American. Eleanor would pitch, probably southpaw. Rosalind
was outfield, wonderful hitter, Clara first base, maybe. Wonder what
Humbird's body looked like now. If he himself hadn't been bayonet
instructor he'd have gone up to line three months sooner, probably been
killed. Where's the darned bell--

The street numbers of Riverside Drive were obscured by the mist and
dripping trees from anything but the swiftest scrutiny, but Amory had
finally caught sight of one--One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street.
He got off and with no distinct destination followed a winding,
descending sidewalk and came out facing the river, in particular a long
pier and a partitioned litter of shipyards for miniature craft: small
launches, canoes, rowboats, and catboats. He turned northward and
followed the shore, jumped a small wire fence and found himself in a
great disorderly yard adjoining a dock. The hulls of many boats in
various stages of repair were around him; he smelled sawdust and paint
and the scarcely distinguishable fiat odor of the Hudson. A man
approached through the heavy gloom.

"Hello," said Amory.

"Got a pass?"

"No. Is this private?"

"This is the Hudson River Sporting and Yacht Club."

"Oh! I didn't know. I'm just resting."

"Well--" began the man dubiously.

"I'll go if you want me to."

The man made non-committal noises in his throat and passed on. Amory
seated himself on an overturned boat and leaned forward thoughtfully
until his chin rested in his hand.

"Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man," he said slowly.

* * * *

IN THE DROOPING HOURS

While the rain drizzled on Amory looked futilely back at the stream of
his life, all its glitterings and dirty shallows. To begin with, he was
still afraid--not physically afraid any more, but afraid of people and
prejudice and misery and monotony. Yet, deep in his bitter heart,
he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He
knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his
own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that
often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper
ingratiatingly: "No. Genius!" That was one manifestation of fear,
that voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good,
that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and
twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity.
Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own
personality--he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days
after he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word
like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor. He was ashamed of the
fact that very simple and honest people usually distrusted him; that he
had been cruel, often, to those who had sunk their personalities in him--
several girls, and a man here and there through college, that he had been
an evil influence on; people who had followed him here and there into
mental adventures from which he alone rebounded unscathed.

Usually, on nights like this, for there had been many lately, he could
escape from this consuming introspection by thinking of children and the
infinite possibilities of children--he leaned and listened and he heard a
startled baby awake in a house across the street and lend a tiny whimper
to the still night. Quick as a flash he turned away, wondering with a
touch of panic whether something in the brooding despair of his mood had
made a darkness in its tiny soul. He shivered. What if some day the
balance was overturned, and he became a thing that frightened children
and crept into rooms in the dark, approached dim communion with those
phantoms who whispered shadowy secrets to the mad of that dark continent
upon the moon. . . .

* * * *

Amory smiled a bit.

"You're too much wrapped up in yourself," he heard some one say. And
again--

"Get out and do some real work--"

"Stop worrying--"

He fancied a possible future comment of his own.

"Yes--I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but I soon found it made me
morbid to think too much about myself."

* * * *

Suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to let himself go to the devil--
not to go violently as a gentleman should, but to sink safely and
sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an adobe house in Mexico,
half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his slender, artistic fingers
closed on a cigarette while he listened to guitars strumming melancholy
undertones to an age-old dirge of Castile and an olive-skinned,
carmine-lipped girl caressed his hair. Here he might live a strange
litany, delivered from right and wrong and from the hound of heaven
and from every God (except the exotic Mexican one who was pretty slack
himself and rather addicted to Oriental scents)--delivered from success
and hope and poverty into that long chute of indulgence which led,
after all, only to the artificial lake of death.

There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly: Port
Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the South Seas--
all lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where lust could be a
mode and expression of life, where the shades of night skies and sunsets
would seem to reflect only moods of passion: the colors of lips and
poppies.

* * * *

STILL WEEDING

Once he had been miraculously able to scent evil as a horse detects a
broken bridge at night, but the man with the queer feet in Phoebe's
room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His instinct perceived the
fetidness of poverty, but no longer ferreted out the deeper evils in
pride and sensuality.

There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes; Burne Holiday
was sunk from sight as though he had never lived; Monsignor was dead.
Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened
eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical
reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours
of night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had
defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs,
at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom.
The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession of
Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits,
Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college
reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and
creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to
express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each
had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety
generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the
convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith
will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

Women--of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to
transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously
incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of
experience--had become merely consecrations to their own posterity.
Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all removed by their very beauty,
around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of contributing
anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.

Amory based his loss of faith in help from others on several sweeping
syllogisms. Granted that his generation, however bruised and decimated
from this Victorian war, were the heirs of progress. Waving aside petty
differences of conclusions which, although they might occasionally cause
the deaths of several millions of young men, might be explained away--
supposing that after all Bernard Shaw and Bernhardi, Bonar Law and
Bethmann-Hollweg were mutual heirs of progress if only in agreeing
against the ducking of witches--waiving the antitheses and approaching
individually these men who seemed to be the leaders, he was repelled by
the discrepancies and contradictions in the men themselves.

There was, for example, Thornton Hancock, respected by half the
intellectual world as an authority on life, a man who had verified and
believed the code he lived by, an educator of educators, an adviser to
Presidents--yet Amory knew that this man had, in his heart, leaned on
the priest of another religion.

And Monsignor, upon whom a cardinal rested, had moments of strange and
horrible insecurity--inexplicable in a religion that explained even
disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you doubted the devil it was the
devil that made you doubt him. Amory had seen Monsignor go to the houses
of stolid philistines, read popular novels furiously, saturate himself
in routine, to escape from that horror.

And this priest, a little wiser, somewhat purer, had been, Amory knew,
not essentially older than he.

Amory was alone--he had escaped from a small enclosure into a great
labyrinth. He was where Goethe was when he began "Faust"; he was where
Conrad was when he wrote "Almayer's Folly."

Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people
who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and sought
the labyrinth. There were men like Wells and Plato, who had, half
unconsciously, a strange, hidden orthodoxy, who would accept for
themselves only what could be accepted for all men--incurable
romanticists who never, for all their efforts, could enter the labyrinth
as stark souls; there were on the other hand sword-like pioneering
personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed much slower,
yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line of
speculative philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach
a positive value to life. . . .

Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a strong
distrust of all generalities and epigrams. They were too easy, too
dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the
public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had
popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzsche and
Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions
of dead genius through some one else's clever paradoxes and didactic
epigrams.

Life was a damned muddle . . . a football game with every one off-side
and the referee gotten rid of--every one claiming the referee would have
been on his side. . . .

Progress was a labyrinth . . . people plunging blindly in and then
rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it . . . the invisible
king--the elan vital--the principle of evolution . . . writing a book,
starting a war, founding a school. . . .

Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all
inquiries with himself. He was his own best example--sitting in the rain,
a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own
temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in
building up the living consciousness of the race.

In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance
of the labyrinth.

* * * *

Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi hurried along
the street, its lamps still shining like burning eyes in a face white
from a night's carouse. A melancholy siren sounded far down the river.

* * * *

MONSIGNOR

Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral.
It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical. Bishop O'Neill sang solemn
high mass and the cardinal gave the final absolutions. Thornton Hancock,
Mrs. Lawrence, the British and Italian ambassadors, the papal delegate,
and a host of friends and priests were there--yet the inexorable shears
had cut through all these threads that Monsignor had gathered into his
hands. To Amory it was a haunting grief to see him lying in his coffin,
with closed hands upon his purple vestments. His face had not changed,
and, as he never knew he was dying, it showed no pain or fear. It was
Amory's dear old friend, his and the others'--for the church was full
of people with daft, staring faces, the most exalted seeming the most
stricken.

The cardinal, like an archangel in cope and mitre, sprinkled the holy
water; the organ broke into sound; the choir began to sing the Requiem
Eternam.

All these people grieved because they had to some extent depended upon
Monsignor. Their grief was more than sentiment for the "crack in his
voice or a certain break in his walk," as Wells put it. These people had
leaned on Monsignor's faith, his way of finding cheer, of making religion
a thing of lights and shadows, making all light and shadow merely aspects
of God. People felt safe when he was near.

Of Amory's attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full realization
of his disillusion, but of Monsignor's funeral was born the romantic elf
who was to enter the labyrinth with him. He found something that he
wanted, had always wanted and always would want--not to be admired,
as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe;
but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable; he remembered the
sense of security he had found in Burne.

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory
suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing
listlessly in his mind: "Very few things matter and nothing matters
very much."

On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of
security.

* * * *

THE BIG MAN WITH GOGGLES

On the day that Amory started on his walk to Princeton the sky was a
colorless vault, cool, high and barren of the threat of rain. It was a
gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far
hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those
abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out
in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds
were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had
harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the
Grecian urn.

The day had put Amory in such a contemplative mood that he caused much
annoyance to several motorists who were forced to slow up considerably
or else run him down. So engrossed in his thoughts was he that he was
scarcely surprised at that strange phenomenon--cordiality manifested
within fifty miles of Manhattan--when a passing car slowed down beside
him and a voice hailed him. He looked up and saw a magnificent
Locomobile in which sat two middle-aged men, one of them small and
anxious looking, apparently an artificial growth on the other who was
large and begoggled and imposing.

"Do you want a lift?" asked the apparently artificial growth, glancing
from the corner of his eye at the imposing man as if for some habitual,
silent corroboration.

"You bet I do. Thanks."

The chauffeur swung open the door, and, climbing in, Amory settled
himself in the middle of the back seat. He took in his companions
curiously. The chief characteristic of the big man seemed to be a
great confidence in himself set off against a tremendous boredom with
everything around him. That part of his face which protruded under the
goggles was what is generally termed "strong"; rolls of not undignified
fat had collected near his chin; somewhere above was a wide thin mouth
and the rough model for a Roman nose, and, below, his shoulders collapsed
without a struggle into the powerful bulk of his chest and belly.
He was excellently and quietly dressed. Amory noticed that he was
inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur's head as if
speculating steadily but hopelessly some baffling hirsute problem.

The smaller man was remarkable only for his complete submersion in the
personality of the other. He was of that lower secretarial type who
at forty have engraved upon their business cards: "Assistant to the
President," and without a sigh consecrate the rest of their lives to
second-hand mannerisms.

"Going far?" asked the smaller man in a pleasant disinterested way.

"Quite a stretch."

"Hiking for exercise?"

"No," responded Amory succinctly, "I'm walking because I can't afford to
ride."

"Oh."

Then again:

"Are you looking for work? Because there's lots of work," he continued
rather testily. "All this talk of lack of work. The West is especially
short of labor." He expressed the West with a sweeping, lateral gesture.
Amory nodded politely.

"Have you a trade?"

No--Amory had no trade.

"Clerk, eh?"

No--Amory was not a clerk.

"Whatever your line is," said the little man, seeming to agree wisely
with something Amory had said, "now is the time of opportunity and
business openings." He glanced again toward the big man, as a lawyer
grilling a witness glances involuntarily at the jury.

Amory decided that he must say something and for the life of him could
think of only one thing to say.

"Of course I want a great lot of money--"

The little man laughed mirthlessly but conscientiously.

"That's what every one wants nowadays, but they don't want to work for
it."

"A very natural, healthy desire. Almost all normal people want to be
rich without great effort--except the financiers in problem plays,
who want to 'crash their way through.' Don't you want easy money?"

"Of course not," said the secretary indignantly.

"But," continued Amory disregarding him, "being very poor at present I am
contemplating socialism as possibly my forte."

Both men glanced at him curiously.

"These bomb throwers--" The little man ceased as words lurched
ponderously from the big man's chest.

"If I thought you were a bomb thrower I'd run you over to the Newark
jail. That's what I think of Socialists."

Amory laughed.

"What are you," asked the big man, "one of these parlor Bolsheviks,
one of these idealists? I must say I fail to see the difference.
The idealists loaf around and write the stuff that stirs up the poor
immigrants."

"Well," said Amory, "if being an idealist is both safe and lucrative,
I might try it."

"What's your difficulty? Lost your job?"

"Not exactly, but--well, call it that."

"What was it?"

"Writing copy for an advertising agency."

"Lots of money in advertising."

Amory smiled discreetly.

"Oh, I'll admit there's money in it eventually. Talent doesn't starve
any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists draw your
magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out rag-time for your
theatres. By the great commercializing of printing you've found a
harmless, polite occupation for every genius who might have carved his
own niche. But beware the artist who's an intellectual also. The artist
who doesn't fit--the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory
Blaine--"

"Who's he?" demanded the little man suspiciously.

"Well," said Amory, "he's a--he's an intellectual personage not very well
known at present."

The little man laughed his conscientious laugh, and stopped rather
suddenly as Amory's burning eyes turned on him.

"What are you laughing at?"

"These _intellectual_ people--"

"Do you know what it means?"

The little man's eyes twitched nervously.

"Why, it _usually_ means--"

"It _always_ means brainy and well-educated," interrupted Amory. "It
means having an active knowledge of the race's experience." Amory
decided to be very rude. He turned to the big man. "The young man,"
he indicated the secretary with his thumb, and said young man as one
says bell-boy, with no implication of youth, "has the usual muddled
connotation of all popular words."

"You object to the fact that capital controls printing?" said the big man,
fixing him with his goggles.

"Yes--and I object to doing their mental work for them. It seemed
to me that the root of all the business I saw around me consisted in
overworking and underpaying a bunch of dubs who submitted to it."

"Here now," said the big man, "you'll have to admit that the laboring
man is certainly highly paid--five and six hour days--it's ridiculous.
You can't buy an honest day's work from a man in the trades-unions."

"You've brought it on yourselves," insisted Amory. "You people never
make concessions until they're wrung out of you."

"What people?"

"Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by
inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed
class."

"Do you imagine that if that road-mender over there had the money he'd be
any more willing to give it up?"

"No, but what's that got to do with it?"

The older man considered.

"No, I'll admit it hasn't. It rather sounds as if it had though."

"In fact," continued Amory, "he'd be worse. The lower classes are
narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfish--certainly more
stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question."

"Just exactly what is the question?"

Here Amory had to pause to consider exactly what the question was.

* * * *

AMORY COINS A PHRASE

"When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education," began Amory
slowly, "that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten,
a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned.
He may be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in his own way, but his
first job is to provide and to hold fast. His wife shoos him on, from
ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed
treadmill that hasn't any windows. He's done! Life's got him! He's
no help! He's a spiritually married man."

Amory paused and decided that it wasn't such a bad phrase.

"Some men," he continued, "escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no
social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous
book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did
and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe,
the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists,
statesmen who aren't just popular grab-bags for a half-dozen women and
children."

"He's the natural radical?"

"Yes," said Amory. "He may vary from the disillusioned critic like old
Thornton Hancock, all the way to Trotsky. Now this spiritually unmarried
man hasn't direct power, for unfortunately the spiritually married man,
as a by-product of his money chase, has garnered in the great newspaper,
the popular magazine, the influential weekly--so that Mrs. Newspaper,
Mrs. Magazine, Mrs. Weekly can have a better limousine than those oil
people across the street or those cement people 'round the corner."

"Why not?"

"It makes wealthy men the keepers of the world's intellectual conscience
and, of course, a man who has money under one set of social institutions
quite naturally can't risk his family's happiness by letting the clamor
for another appear in his newspaper."

"But it appears," said the big man.

"Where?--in the discredited mediums. Rotten cheap-papered weeklies."

"All right--go on."

"Well, my first point is that through a mixture of conditions of which
the family is the first, there are these two sorts of brains. One sort
takes human nature as it finds it, uses its timidity, its weakness,
and its strength for its own ends. Opposed is the man who, being
spiritually unmarried, continually seeks for new systems that will
control or counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not
life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.
That is his struggle. He is a part of progress--the spiritually married
man is not."

The big man produced three big cigars, and proffered them on his huge
palm. The little man took one, Amory shook his head and reached for a
cigarette.

"Go on talking," said the big man. "I've been wanting to hear one of you
fellows."

* * * *

GOING FASTER

"Modern life," began Amory again, "changes no longer century by century,
but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before--populations
doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations,
economic interdependence, racial questions, and--we're _dawdling_ along.
My idea is that we've got to go very much faster." He slightly
emphasized the last words and the chauffeur unconsciously increased the
speed of the car. Amory and the big man laughed; the little man laughed,
too, after a pause.

"Every child," said Amory, "should have an equal start. If his father
can endow him with a good physique and his mother with some common sense
in his early education, that should be his heritage. If the father can't
give him a good physique, if the mother has spent in chasing men the
years in which she should have been preparing herself to educate her
children, so much the worse for the child. He shouldn't be artificially
bolstered up with money, sent to these horrible tutoring schools, dragged
through college . . . Every boy ought to have an equal start."

"All right," said the big man, his goggles indicating neither approval
nor objection.

"Next I'd have a fair trial of government ownership of all industries."

"That's been proven a failure."

"No--it merely failed. If we had government ownership we'd have the best
analytical business minds in the government working for something besides
themselves. We'd have Mackays instead of Burlesons; we'd have Morgans
in the Treasury Department; we'd have Hills running interstate commerce.
We'd have the best lawyers in the Senate."

"They wouldn't give their best efforts for nothing. McAdoo--"

"No," said Amory, shaking his head. "Money isn't the only stimulus that
brings out the best that's in a man, even in America."

"You said a while ago that it was."

"It is, right now. But if it were made illegal to have more than a
certain amount the best men would all flock for the one other reward
which attracts humanity--honor."

The big man made a sound that was very like _boo_.

"That's the silliest thing you've said yet."

"No, it isn't silly. It's quite plausible. If you'd gone to college
you'd have been struck by the fact that the men there would work twice
as hard for any one of a hundred petty honors as those other men did who
were earning their way through."

"Kids--child's play!" scoffed his antagonist.

"Not by a darned sight--unless we're all children. Did you ever see a
grown man when he's trying for a secret society--or a rising family whose
name is up at some club? They'll jump when they hear the sound of the
word. The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front
of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that
we've forgotten there's any other way. We've made a world where that's
necessary. Let me tell you"--Amory became emphatic--"if there were ten
men insured against either wealth or starvation, and offered a green
ribbon for five hours' work a day and a blue ribbon for ten hours' work
a day, nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon.
That competitive instinct only wants a badge. If the size of their house
is the badge they'll sweat their heads off for that. If it's only a blue
ribbon, I damn near believe they'll work just as hard. They have in
other ages."

"I don't agree with you."

"I know it," said Amory nodding sadly. "It doesn't matter any more
though. I think these people are going to come and take what they want
pretty soon."

A fierce hiss came from the little man.

"_Machine-guns!_"

"Ah, but you've taught them their use."

The big man shook his head.

"In this country there are enough property owners not to permit that sort
of thing."

Amory wished he knew the statistics of property owners and non-property
owners; he decided to change the subject.

But the big man was aroused.

"When you talk of 'taking things away,' you're on dangerous ground."

"How can they get it without taking it? For years people have been
stalled off with promises. Socialism may not be progress, but the threat
of the red flag is certainly the inspiring force of all reform. You've
got to be sensational to get attention."

"Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I suppose?"

"Quite possibly," admitted Amory. "Of course, it's overflowing just as
the French Revolution did, but I've no doubt that it's really a great
experiment and well worth while."

"Don't you believe in moderation?"

"You won't listen to the moderates, and it's almost too late. The truth
is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things
that they do about once in a hundred years. They've seized an idea."

"What is it?"

"That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs
are essentially the same."

* * * *

THE LITTLE MAN GETS HIS

"If you took all the money in the world," said the little man with much
profundity, "and divided it up in equ--"

"Oh, shut up!" said Amory briskly and, paying no attention to the little
man's enraged stare, he went on with his argument.

"The human stomach--" he began; but the big man interrupted rather
impatiently.

"I'm letting you talk, you know," he said, "but please avoid stomachs.
I've been feeling mine all day. Anyway, I don't agree with one-half
you've said. Government ownership is the basis of your whole argument,
and it's invariably a beehive of corruption. Men won't work for blue
ribbons, that's all rot."

When he ceased the little man spoke up with a determined nod, as if
resolved this time to have his say out.

"There are certain things which are human nature," he asserted with an
owl-like look, "which always have been and always will be, which can't be
changed."

Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly.

"Listen to that! _That's_ what makes me discouraged with progress.
_Listen_ to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena
that have been changed by the will of man--a hundred instincts in man
that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization.
What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last
refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world. It negates the
efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor,
and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity's service. It's a
flat impeachment of all that's worth while in human nature. Every person
over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought
to be deprived of the franchise."

The little man leaned back against the seat, his face purple with rage.
Amory continued, addressing his remarks to the big man.

"These quarter-educated, stale-minded men such as your friend here,
who _think_ they think, every question that comes up, you'll find his
type in the usual ghastly muddle. One minute it's 'the brutality and
inhumanity of these Prussians'--the next it's 'we ought to exterminate
the whole German people.' They always believe that 'things are in a bad
way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.' One minute
they call Wilson 'just a dreamer, not practical'--a year later they rail
at him for making his dreams realities. They haven't clear logical ideas
on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change.
They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't
see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are
going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle.
That--is the great middle class!"

The big man with a broad grin on his face leaned over and smiled at the
little man.

"You're catching it pretty heavy, Garvin; how do you feel?"

The little man made an attempt to smile and act as if the whole matter
were so ridiculous as to be beneath notice. But Amory was not through.

"The theory that people are fit to govern themselves rests on this man.
If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed
of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and
sentimentalisms, then I'm a militant Socialist. If he can't, then I
don't think it matters much what happens to man or his systems, now or
hereafter."

"I am both interested and amused," said the big man. "You are very
young."

"Which may only mean that I have neither been corrupted nor made timid
by contemporary experience. I possess the most valuable experience, the
experience of the race, for in spite of going to college I've managed to
pick up a good education."

"You talk glibly."

"It's not all rubbish," cried Amory passionately. "This is the first
time in my life I've argued Socialism. It's the only panacea I know.
I'm restless. My whole generation is restless. I'm sick of a system
where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her,
where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button
manufacturer. Even if I had no talents I'd not be content to work ten
years, condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give
some man's son an automobile."

"But, if you're not sure--"

"That doesn't matter," exclaimed Amory. "My position couldn't be worse.
A social revolution might land me on top. Of course I'm selfish.
It seems to me I've been a fish out of water in too many outworn systems.
I was probably one of the two dozen men in my class at college who got
a decent education; still they'd let any well-tutored flathead play
football and _I_ was ineligible, because some silly old men thought we
should _all_ profit by conic sections. I loathed the army. I loathed
business. I'm in love with change and I've killed my conscience--"

"So you'll go along crying that we must go faster."

"That, at least, is true," Amory insisted. "Reform won't catch up to the
needs of civilization unless it's made to. A laissez-faire policy is
like spoiling a child by saying he'll turn out all right in the end.
He will--if he's made to."

"But you don't believe all this Socialist patter you talk."

"I don't know. Until I talked to you I hadn't thought seriously about
it. I wasn't sure of half of what I said."

"You puzzle me," said the big man, "but you're all alike. They say
Bernard Shaw, in spite of his doctrines, is the most exacting of all
dramatists about his royalties. To the last farthing."

"Well," said Amory, "I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile
mind in a restless generation--with every reason to throw my mind and pen
in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all
blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my
sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old
cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various
times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't a
seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game."

For a minute neither spoke and then the big man asked:

"What was your university?"

"Princeton."

The big man became suddenly interested; the expression of his goggles
altered slightly.

"I sent my son to Princeton."

"Did you?"

"Perhaps you knew him. His name was Jesse Ferrenby. He was killed last
year in France."

"I knew him very well. In fact, he was one of my particular friends."

"He was--a--quite a fine boy. We were very close."

Amory began to perceive a resemblance between the father and the dead son
and he told himself that there had been all along a sense of familiarity.
Jesse Ferrenby, the man who in college had borne off the crown that he
had aspired to. It was all so far away. What little boys they had been,
working for blue ribbons--

The car slowed up at the entrance to a great estate, ringed around by a
huge hedge and a tall iron fence.

"Won't you come in for lunch?"

Amory shook his head.

"Thank you, Mr. Ferrenby, but I've got to get on."

The big man held out his hand. Amory saw that the fact that he had known
Jesse more than outweighed any disfavor he had created by his opinions.
What ghosts were people with which to work! Even the little man insisted
on shaking hands.

"Good-by!" shouted Mr. Ferrenby, as the car turned the corner and started
up the drive. "Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories."

"Same to you, sir," cried Amory, smiling and waving his hand.

* * * *

"OUT OF THE FIRE, OUT OF THE LITTLE ROOM"

Eight hours from Princeton Amory sat down by the Jersey roadside and
looked at the frost-bitten country. Nature as a rather coarse phenomenon
composed largely of flowers that, when closely inspected, appeared
moth-eaten, and of ants that endlessly traversed blades of grass, was
always disillusioning; nature represented by skies and waters and far
horizons was more likable. Frost and the promise of winter thrilled
him now, made him think of a wild battle between St. Regis and Groton,
ages ago, seven years ago--and of an autumn day in France twelve months
before when he had lain in tall grass, his platoon flattened down close
around him, waiting to tap the shoulders of a Lewis gunner. He saw the
two pictures together with somewhat the same primitive exaltation--
two games he had played, differing in quality of acerbity, linked in a
way that differed them from Rosalind or the subject of labyrinths which
were, after all, the business of life.

"I am selfish," he thought.

"This is not a quality that will change when I 'see human suffering' or
'lose my parents' or 'help others.'

"This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

"It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness
that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

"There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make
sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay
down my life for a friend--all because these things may be the best
possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of
human kindness."

The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex.
He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic worship in
Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with evil was beauty--
beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor's voice, in an
old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like superimposed
waterfalls, half rhythm, half darkness. Amory knew that every time
he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the
grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most
of all the beauty of women.

After all, it had too many associations with license and indulgence.
Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were never good. And in
this new loneness of his that had been selected for what greatness he
might achieve, beauty must be relative or, itself a harmony, it would
make only a discord.

In a sense this gradual renunciation of beauty was the second step after
his disillusion had been made complete. He felt that he was leaving
behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so
much more important to be a certain sort of man.

His mind turned a corner suddenly and he found himself thinking of the
Catholic Church. The idea was strong in him that there was a certain
intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary, and
religion to Amory meant the Church of Rome. Quite conceivably it was an
empty ritual but it was seemingly the only assimilative, traditionary
bulwark against the decay of morals. Until the great mobs could be
educated into a moral sense some one must cry: "Thou shalt not!" Yet
any acceptance was, for the present, impossible. He wanted time and
the absence of ulterior pressure. He wanted to keep the tree without
ornaments, realize fully the direction and momentum of this new start.

* * * *

The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o'clock to the golden
beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting
sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at twilight he came to a
graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a
new moon in the sky and shadows everywhere. On an impulse he considered
trying to open the door of a rusty iron vault built into the side of a
hill; a vault washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy
watery-blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the
touch with a sickening odor.

Amory wanted to feel "William Dayfield, 1864."

He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain. Somehow
he could find nothing hopeless in having lived. All the broken columns
and clasped hands and doves and angels meant romances. He fancied that
in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate as to
whether his eyes were brown or blue, and he hoped quite passionately that
his grave would have about it an air of many, many years ago. It seemed
strange that out of a row of Union soldiers two or three made him think
of dead loves and dead lovers, when they were exactly like the rest,
even to the yellowish moss.

* * * *

Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible,
with here and there a late-burning light--and suddenly out of the clear
darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit
of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the
muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and
half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new
generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a
revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that
dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated
more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success;
grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man
shaken. . . .

Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself--art, politics,
religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free
from all hysteria--he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel,
sleep deep through many nights. . . .

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot;
there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth--yet
the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility
and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized
dreams. But--oh, Rosalind! Rosalind! . . .

"It's all a poor substitute at best," he said sadly.

And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had
determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the
personalities he had passed. . . .

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."






Appendix: Production notes for eBook edition 11

The primary feature of edition 11 is restoration of em-dashes which
are missing from edition 10. (My favorite instance is "I won't belong"
rather than "I won't be--long".)

Characters which are 8-bit in the printed text were misrepresented in
edition 10. Edition 10 had some end-of-paragraph problems. A handful
of other minor errors are corrected.

Two volumes served as reference for edition 11: a 1960 reprint, and
an undated reprint produced sometime after 1948. There are a number
of differences between the volumes. Evidence suggests that the 1960
reprint has been somewhat "modernized", and that the undated reprint
is a better match for the original 1920 printing. Therefore, when the
volumes differ, edition 11 more closely follows the undated reprint.

In edition 11, underscores are used to denote words and phrases
italicized for emphasis.

There is a section of text in book 2, chapter 3, beginning with
"When Vanity kissed Vanity," which is referred to as "poetry" but is
formatted as prose.

I considererd, but decided against introducing an 8-bit version of
edition 11, in large part because the bulk of the 8-bit usage (as found
in the 1960 reprint) consists of words commonly used in their 7-bit form:
Aeschylus blase cafe debut debutante elan elite Encyclopaedia
matinee minutiae paean regime soupcon unaesthetic
Less-commonly-used 8-bit word forms in this book include:
anaemic bleme coeur manoeuvered mediaevalist tete-a-tete
and the name "Borge".

Edition 11 was produced by Ken Reeder.







 


Back to Full Books