The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald Page A

into the vestibules and covered the floor with a slippery coating. It was intriguing, this cold, it crept in everywhere. Her breath was quite visible and she blew into the air with a naïve enjoyment. Seated in the diner she stared out the window at white hills and valleys and scattered pines whose every branch was a green platter for a cold feast of snow. Sometimes a solitary farmhouse would fly by, ugly and bleak and lone on the white waste; and with each one she had an instant of chill compassion for the souls shut in there waiting for spring.
    As she left the diner and swayed back into the Pullman she experienced a surging rush of energy and wondered if she was feeling the bracing air of which Harry had spoken. This was the North, the North—her land now!
    “Then blow, ye winds, heigho!
A-roving I will go,” 1
    she chanted exultantly to herself.
    “What’s ’at?” inquired the porter politely.
    “I said: ‘Brush me off.’ ”
    The long wires of the telegraph-poles doubled; two tracks ran up beside the train—three—four; came a succession of white-roofed houses, a glimpse of a trolley-car with frosted windows, streets—more streets—the city.
    She stood for a dazed moment in the frosty station before she saw three fur-bundled figures descending upon her.
    “There she is!”
    “Oh, Sally Carrol!”
    Sally Carrol dropped her bag.
    “Hi!”
    A faintly familiar icy-cold face kissed her, and then she was in a group of faces all apparently emitting great clouds of heavy smoke; she was shaking hands. There were Gordon, a short, eager man of thirty who looked like an amateur knocked-about model for Harry, and his wife, Myra, a listless lady with flaxen hair under a fur automobile cap. Almost immediately Sally Carrol thought of her as vaguely Scandinavian. A cheerful chauffeur adopted her bag, and amid ricochets of half-phrases, exclamations, and perfunctory listless “my dears” from Myra, they swept each other from the station.
    Then they were in a sedan bound through a crooked succession of snowy streets where dozens of little boys were hitching sleds behind grocery wagons and automobiles.
    “Oh,” cried Sally Carrol, “I want to do that! Can we, Harry?”
    “That’s for kids. But we might——”
    “It looks like such a circus!” she said regretfully.
    Home was a rambling frame house set on a white lap of snow, and there she met a big, gray-haired man of whom she approved, and a lady who was like an egg, and who kissed her—these were Harry’s parents. There was a breathless indescribable hour crammed full of half-sentences, hot water, bacon and eggs and confusion; and after that she was alone with Harry in the library, asking him if she dared smoke.
    It was a large room with a Madonna over the fireplace and rows upon rows of books in covers of light gold and dark gold and shiny red. All the chairs had little lace squares where one’s head should rest, the couch was just comfortable, the books looked as if they had been read—some—and Sally Carrol had an instantaneous vision of the battered old library at home, with her father’s huge medical books, and the oil-paintings of her three great-uncles, and the old couch that had been mended up for forty-five years and was still luxurious to dream in. This room struck her as being neither attractive nor particularly otherwise. It was simply a room with a lot of fairly expensive things in it that all looked about fifteen years old.
    “What do you think of it up here?” demanded Harry eagerly. “Does it surprise you? Is it what you expected, I mean?”
    “You are, Harry,” she said quietly, and reached out her arms to him.
    But after a brief kiss he seemed anxious to extort enthusiasm from her.
    “The town, I mean. Do you like it? Can you feel the pep in the air?”
    “Oh, Harry,” she laughed, “you’ll have to give me time. You can’t just fling questions at me.”
    She puffed at her cigarette with a sigh of contentment.
    “One thing I