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

her.”
    “Oh!”
    “Paid me a call about three and stayed till five. Peculiar little soul—she gets me. She’s so utterly stupid.”
    Maury was silent.
    “Strange as it may seem,” continued Anthony, “so far as I’m concerned, and even so far as I know, Geraldine is a paragon of virtue.”
    He had known her a month, a girl of nondescript and nomadic habits. Some one had casually passed her on to Anthony, who considered her amusing and rather liked the chaste and fairylike kisses she had given him on the third night of their acquaintance, when they had driven in a taxi through the Park. She had a vague family—a shadowy aunt and uncle who shared with her an apartment in the labyrinthine hundreds. She was company, familiar and faintly intimate and restful. Further than that he did not care to experiment—not from any moral compunction, but from a dread of allowing any entanglement to disturb what he felt was the growing serenity of his life.
    “She has two stunts,” he informed Maury; “one of them is to get her hair over her eyes some way and then blow it out, and the other is to say ‘You cra-a-azy!’ when some one makes a remark that’s over her head. It fascinates me. I sit there hour after hour, completely intrigued by the maniacal symptoms she finds in my imagination.”
    Maury stirred in his chair and spoke.
    “Remarkable that a person can comprehend so little and yet live in such a complex civilization. A woman like that actually takes the whole universe in the most matter-of-fact way. From the influence of Rousseau b to the bearing of the tariff rates on her dinner, the whole phenomenon is utterly strange to her. She’s just been carried along from an age of spearheads and plunked down here with the equipment of an archer for going into a pistol duel. You could sweep away the entire crust of history and she’d never know the difference.”
    “I wish our Richard would write about her.”
    “Anthony, surely you don’t think she’s worth writing about.”
    “As much as anybody,” he answered, yawning. “You know I was thinking to-day that I have a great confidence in Dick. So long as he sticks to people and not to ideas, and as long as his inspirations come from life and not from art, and always granting a normal growth, I believe he’ll be a big man.”
    “I should think the appearance of the black note-book would prove that he’s going to life.”
    Anthony raised himself on his elbow and answered eagerly:
    “He tries to go to life. So does every author except the very worst, but after all most of them live on predigested food. The incident or character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in terms of the last book he read. For instance, suppose he meets a sea-captain and thinks he’s an original character. The truth is that he sees the resemblance between the sea-captain and the last sea-captain Dana created, or whoever creates sea-captains, and therefore he knows how to set this sea-captain on paper. Dick, of course, can set down any consciously picturesque, character-like character, but could he accurately transcribe his own sister?”
    Then they were off for half an hour on literature.
    “A classic,” suggested Anthony, “is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it’s safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It’s acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion....”
    After a time the subject temporarily lost its tang. The interest of the two young men was not particularly technical. They were in love with generalities. Anthony had recently discovered Samuel Butler c and the brisk aphorisms in the note-book seemed to him the quintessence of criticism. Maury, his whole mind so thoroughly mellowed by the very hardness of his scheme of life, seemed inevitably the wiser of the two, yet in the actual stuff of their intelligences they were not, it seemed, fundamentally different.
    They drifted