Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

soon?
    “Oh, yes.”
    Gloria would be awfully sorry!
    “Good-by—”
    “Good-by—”
    Smiles!
    Smiles!
    Bang!
    Two disconsolate young men walking down the tenth-floor corridor of the Plaza in the direction of the elevator.

A Lady’s Legs
    Behind Maury Noble’s attractive indolence, his irrelevance and his easy mockery, lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose. 1 His intention, as he stated it in college, had been to use three years in travel, three years in utter leisure—and then to become immensely rich as quickly as possible.
    His three years of travel were over. He had accomplished the globe with an intensity and curiosity that in any one else would have seemed pedantic, without redeeming spontaneity, almost the self-editing of a human Baedeker; but, in this case, it assumed an air of mysterious purpose and significant design—as though Maury Noble were some predestined anti-Christ, urged by a preordination to go everywhere there was to go along the earth and to see all the billions of humans who bred and wept and slew each other here and there upon it.
    Back in America, he was sallying into the search for amusement with the same consistent absorption. He who had never taken more than a few cocktails or a pint of wine at a sitting, taught himself to drink as he would have taught himself Greek—like Greek it would be the gateway to a wealth of new sensations, new psychic states, new reactions in joy or misery.
    His habits were a matter for esoteric speculation. He had three rooms in a bachelor apartment on Forty-fourth Street, but he was seldom to be found there. The telephone girl had received the most positive instructions that no one should even have his ear without first giving a name to be passed upon. She had a list of half a dozen people to whom he was never at home, and of the same number to whom he was always at home. Foremost on the latter list were Anthony Patch and Richard Caramel.
    Maury’s mother lived with her married son in Philadelphia, and there Maury went usually for the week-ends, so one Saturday night when Anthony, prowling the chilly streets in a fit of utter boredom, dropped in at the Molton Arms he was overjoyed to find that Mr. Noble was at home.
    His spirits soared faster than the flying elevator. This was so good, so extremely good, to be about to talk to Maury—who would be equally happy at seeing him. They would look at each other with a deep affection just behind their eyes which both would conceal beneath some attenuated raillery. Had it been summer they would have gone out together and indolently sipped two long Tom Collinses, as they wilted their collars and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall buildings and December just up the street, so better far an evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill’s, or a thimbleful of Maury’s Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and catlike, in his favorite chair.
    There he was! The room closed about Anthony, warmed him. The glow of that strong persuasive mind, that temperament almost Oriental in its outward impassivity, warmed Anthony’s restless soul and brought him a peace that could be likened only to the peace a stupid woman gives. One must understand all—else one must take all for granted. Maury filled the room, tigerlike, godlike. The winds outside were stilled; the brass candlesticks on the mantel glowed like tapers before an altar.
    “What keeps you here to-day?” Anthony spread himself over a yielding sofa and made an elbow-rest among the pillows.
    “Just been here an hour. Tea dance—and I stayed so late I missed my train to Philadelphia.”
    “Strange to stay so long,” commented Anthony curiously.
    “Rather. What’d you do?”
    “Geraldine. Little usher at Keith’s. I told you about