Book 3, Chapter 2, Part 2 of 2, of The Beautiful and Damned. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Book 3, Chapter 2, A Matter of Aesthetics. Part 2 of 2. Further Adventures with Heart Talks. With an accompaniment of ironic laughter, Anthony told Gloria the story of his commercial adventure, but she listened without amusement. �You're going to give up again?� she demanded coldly. �Why, you don't expect me to.  If there's anything older than the old story, it's the new twist. It required an astonishing amount of moral energy on Gloria's part to intimidate him into returning, and when he reported the next day, somewhat depressed from his perusal of the senile bromides skittishly set forth in Heart Talks on Ambition, he found only fifty of the original three hundred awaiting the appearance of the vital and compelling Sammy Carlton. Mr. Carlton's powers of vitality and compulsion were, this time, exercised in elucidating that magnificent piece of speculation, how to sell. It seemed that the approved method was to state one's proposition, and then to say, �Not, and now will you buy�, this was not the way, oh no, the way was to state one's proposition, and then, having reduced one's adversary to a state of exhaustion, to deliver oneself of the categorical imperative, �Now see here, you've taken up my time explaining this matter to you, you've admitted my points, all I want to ask is, how many do you want?� As Mr. Carlton piled assertion upon assertion, Anthony began to feel a sort of disgusted confidence in him. The man appeared to know what he was talking about. Obviously prosperous, he had risen to the position of instructing others. It did not occur to Anthony that the type of man who attains commercial success seldom knows how or why, and, as in his grandfather's case, when he ascribes reasons, the reasons are generally inaccurate and absurd. Anthony noted that, of the numerous old men who had answered the original advertisement, only two had returned, and that among the thirty odd who assembled on the third day to get actual selling instructions from Mr. Carlton, only one grey head was in evidence. These thirty were eager converts. With their mouths they followed the working of Mr. Carlton's mouth, they swayed in their seats with enthusiasm, and in the intervals of his talk they spoke to each other, intense approving whispers. Yet of the chosen few who, in the words of Mr. Carlton, were determined to get those desserts that rightly and truly belonged to them, less than half a dozen combined even a modicum of personal appearance with that great gift of being a pusher. But they were told that they were all natural pushers, it was merely necessary that they should believe with a sort of savage passion in what they were selling. He even urged each one to buy some stock himself, if possible, in order to increase his own sincerity. On the fifth day then, Anthony sallied into the street, with all the sensations of a man wanted by the police. Acting according to instructions, he selected a tall office building in order that he might ride to the top story and work downward, stopping in every office that had a name on the door. But at the last minute he hesitated. Perhaps it would be more practicable to acclimate himself to the chilly atmosphere which he felt was awaiting him by trying a few offices on, say, Madison Avenue. He went into an arcade that seemed only semi-prosperous, and, seeing a sign which read, Percy B. Weatherby, architect, he opened the door heroically and entered. A starchy young woman looked up questioningly. Can I see Mr. Weatherby? He wondered if his voice sounded tremulous. She laid her hand tentatively on the telephone receiver. What's the name, please? He wouldn't—ah, know me—he wouldn't know my name. What's your business with him? You an insurance agent? Oh, no, nothing like that, denied Anthony hurriedly. Oh, no. It's a—it's a personal matter. He wondered if he should have said this. It had all sounded so simple when Mr. Carlton had enjoined his flock. Don't allow yourself to be kept out. Show them you've made up your mind to talk to them, and they'll listen. The girl succumbed to Anthony's pleasant melancholy face, and in a moment the door to the inner room opened and admitted a tall, splay-footed man with slicked hair. He approached Anthony with ill-concealed impatience. You wanted to see me on a personal matter? Anthony quailed. I wanted to talk to you, he said defiantly. About what? It'll take some time to explain. Well, what's it about? Mr. Weatherby's voice indicated rising irritation. Then Anthony, straining at each word, each syllable, began, I don't know whether or not you've ever heard of a series of pamphlets called Heart Talks. Good grief! cried Percy B. Weatherby, architect. Are you trying to touch my heart? No, it's business. Heart Talks have been incorporated, and we're putting some shares on the market. His voice faded slowly off, harassed by a fixed and contemptuous stare from his unwilling prey. For another minute he struggled on, increasingly sensitive and tangled in his own words. His confidence oozed from him in great wretching emanations that seemed to be sections of his own body. Almost mercifully, Percy B. Weatherby, architect, terminated the interview. Good grief! he exploded in disgust, and you call that a personal matter. He whipped about and strode into his private office, banging the door behind him. Not daring to look at the stenographer, Anthony, in some shameful and mysterious way, got himself from the room. Perspiring profusely he stood in the hall wondering why they didn't come and arrest him. In every hurried look he discerned infallibly a glance of scorn. After an hour and with the help of two strong whiskeys, he brought himself up to another attempt. He walked into a plumber's shop, but when he mentioned his business the plumber began pulling on his coat in a great hurry, gruffly announcing that he had to go to lunch. Anthony remarked politely that it was futile to try and sell a man anything when he was hungry, and the plumber hargently agreed. This episode encouraged Anthony. He tried to think that, had the plumber not been bound for lunch, he would at least have listened. Passing by a few glittering and formidable bazaars he entered a grocery-store. A talkative proprietor told him that, before buying any stocks, he was going to see how the armistice affected the market. To Anthony this seemed almost unfair. In Mr. Carleton's salesman's utopia, the only reason prospective buyers ever gave for not purchasing stock was that they doubted it to be a promising investment. Obviously, a man in that state was almost ludicrously easy game to be brought down merely by the judicious application of the correct selling points, but these men, why, actually, they weren't considering buying anything at all. Anthony took several more drinks before he approached his fourth man, a real estate agent. Nevertheless he was floored with a coup as decisive as a syllogism. The real estate agent said that he had three brothers in the investment business. Viewing himself as a breaker up of homes, Anthony apologized and went out. After another drink he conceived the brilliant plan of selling the stock to the bartenders along Lexington Avenue. This occupied several hours, for it was necessary to take a few drinks in each place in order to get the proprietor in the proper frame of mind to talk business. But the bartenders, one and all, contended that if they had any money to buy bonds they would not be bartenders. It was as though they had all convened and decided upon that rejoinder. As he approached a dark and soggy five o'clock he found that they were developing a still more annoying tendency to turn him off with a jest. At five then, with a tremendous effort at concentration, he decided that he must put more variety into his canvassing. He selected a medium-sized delicatessen store and went in. He felt, illuminatingly, that the thing to do was to cast a spell not only over the storekeeper but over all the customers as well, and perhaps through the psychology of the herd instinct they would buy as an astounded and immediately convinced whole. Afternoon he began in a loud, thick voice. Got a little proposition. If he had wanted silence he obtained it. A sort of awe descended upon the half-dozen women marketing, and upon the grey-haired ancient who, in cap and apron, was slicing chicken. Anthony pulled a batch of papers from his flopping briefcase and waved them cheerfully. By a bond, he suggested, good as liberty bond. The phrase pleased him, and he elaborated upon it. Better in liberty bond, each one of these bonds were two liberty bonds. His mind made a hiatus and skipped to his peroration, which he delivered with appropriate gestures, these being somewhat marred by the necessity of clinging to the counter with one or both hands. Now see here, you've taken out my time, I don't want no why you won't buy, I just want you say why, want you say how many. At this point they should have approached him with checkbooks and fountain pens in hand, realizing that they must have missed a cue, Anthony, with the instincts of an actor, went back and repeated his finale.  Now all I want from you is how many liberty bonds. See here, broke in a new voice, a portly man, whose face was adorned with symmetrical scrolls of yellow hair, had come out of a glass cage in the rear of the store, and was bearing down upon Anthony. See here, you. How many? repeated the salesman sternly. You've taken up my time. Hey, you, cried the proprietor, I'll have you taken up by the police, you most certainly won't, retorted Anthony, with fine defiance. All I want to know is how many. From here and there in the store went up little clouds of comment and expostulation. How terrible. He's a raving maniac, he's disgracefully drunk. The proprietor grasped Anthony's arm sharply. Get out, or I'll call a policeman. Some relics of rationality moved Anthony to nod and replace his bonds clumsily in the case. How many? He reiterated doubtfully. The whole force, if necessary, thundered his adversary, his yellow mustache trembling fiercely. So am I a bond. With this Anthony turned, bowed gravely to his late auditors and wobbled from the store. He found a taxi cab at the corner and rode home to the apartment. There he fell, sound asleep on the sofa, and so Gloria found him, his breath filling the air with an unpleasant pungency, his hand still clutching his open briefcase. Except when Anthony was drinking, his range of sensation had become less than that of a healthy old man, and when prohibition came in July he found that, among those who could afford it, there was more drinking than ever before. One's host now brought out a bottle upon the slightest pretext. The tendency to display liquor was a manifestation of the same instinct that led a man to deck his wife with jewels. To have liquor was a boast, almost a badge of respectability. In the mornings Anthony awoke, tired, nervous, and worried. Halcyon summer twilight and the purple chill of morning alike left him unresponsive. Only for a brief moment every day in the warmth and renewed life of a first highball did his mind turn to those opalescent dreams of future pleasure, the mutual heritage of the happy and the damned. But this was only for a little while. As he grew drunker, the dreams faded, and he became a confused spectre, moving in odd crannies of his own mind, full of unexpected devices, harshly contemptuous at best, and reaching sodden and disparate depths. One night in June he had quarreled violently with Maury over a matter of the utmost triviality. He remembered dimly next morning that it had been about a broken pint bottle of champagne. Maury had told him to sober up, and Anthony's feelings had been hurt. So with an attempted gesture of dignity he had risen from the table and, seizing Gloria's arm, half led, half shamed her into a taxicab outside, leaving Maury with three dinners ordered in tickets for the opera. This sort of semi-tragic fiasco had become so usual that, when they occurred, he was no longer stirred into making amends. If Gloria protested, and of late she was more likely to sink into a contemptuous silence, he would either engage in a bitter defense of himself or else stalk dismally from the apartment. Never since the incident on the station platform at Redgate had he laid his hands on her in anger, though he was withheld often only by some instinct that itself made him tremble with rage. Just as he still cared for her more than for any other creature, so did he more intensely and frequently hate her. So far the judges of the appellate division had failed to hand down a decision, but after another postponement they finally affirmed the decree of the lower court, two justices dissenting. A notice of appeal was served upon Edward Shuddleworth. The case was going to the court of Last Resort, and they were in for another interminable wait, six months, perhaps a year. It had grown enormously unreal to them, remote and uncertain as heaven. Throughout the previous winter one small matter had been a subtle and omnipresent irritant, the question of Gloria's grey fur coat. At that time women, enveloped in long, squirrel wraps, could be seen every few yards along Fifth Avenue. The women were converted to the shape of tops. They seemed porcine and obscene. They resembled kept women in the concealing richness, the feminine animality of the garment. Yet, Gloria wanted a grey, squirrel coat. Discussing the matter, or rather arguing it, for even more than in the first year of their marriage did every discussion take the form of bitter debate, full of such phrases as, most certainly, utterly outrageous. But so, nevertheless, and the ultra-emphatic, regardless, they concluded that they could not afford it. And so gradually it began to stand as a symbol of their growing financial anxiety. To Gloria the shrinkage of their income was a remarkable phenomenon, without explanation or precedent, that it could happen at all within the space of five years seemed almost an intended cruelty conceived and executed by a sardonic god. When they were married, seventy-five hundred a year had seemed ample for a young couple, especially when augmented by the expectation of many millions. Gloria had failed to realize that it was decreasing not only in amount, but in purchasing power, until the payment of Mr. Hathes retaining fee of fifteen thousand dollars made the fact suddenly and startlingly obvious. When Anthony was drafted, they had calculated their income at over four hundred a month, with a dollar even then decreasing in value. But on his return to New York they discovered an even more alarming condition of affairs. They were receiving only forty-five hundred a year from their investments. And though the suit over the will moved ahead of them like a persistent mirage, and the financial danger mark loomed up in the near distance, they found, nevertheless, that living within their income was impossible. So Gloria went without the squirrel coat, and every day upon Fifth Avenue she was a little conscious of her well-worn, half-length leopard skin, now hopelessly old-fashioned. Every other month they sold a bond, yet when the bills were paid it left only enough to be gulped down hungrily by their current expenses. Anthony's calculations showed that their capital would last about seven years longer. So Gloria's heart was very bitter, four in one week, on a prolonged hysterical party, during which Anthony whimsically divested himself of coat, vest, and shirt in a theatre, and was assisted out by a posse of ushers, they spent twice what the grey squirrel coat would have cost. It was November, Indian summer, rather, and a warm, warm night, which was unnecessary, for the work of the summer was done. Babe Ruth had smashed the home-run record for the first time, and Jack Dempsey had broken Jess Willard's cheekbone out in Ohio. Where in Europe the usual number of children had swollen stomachs from starvation, and the diplomats were at their customary business of making the world safe for new wars. In New York City the proletariat were being disciplined, and the odds on Harvard were generally quoted at five to three. Peace had come down in earnest the beginning of new days. Up in the bedroom of the apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, Gloria lay upon her bed and tossed from side to side, sitting up at intervals to throw off a superfluous cover, and once asking Anthony, who was lying awake beside her, to bring her a glass of ice water. Be sure and put ice in it, she said with insistence, it isn't cold enough the way it comes from the faucet. Looking through the frail curtains she could see the rounded moon over the roofs, and beyond it, on the sky, the yellow glow from Times Square. And watching the two incongruous lights her mind worked over an emotion, or rather an intermoven complex of emotions, that had occupied it through the day and the day before that, and back to the last time when she could remember having thought clearly and consecutively about anything, which must have been while Anthony was in the army. She would be twenty-nine in February. The month assumed an ominous and inescapable significance, faking her wonder through these nebulous half-fevered hours, whether after all she had not wasted her faintly tired beauty, whether there was such a thing as use, for any quality bounded by a harsh and inevitable mortality. Years before, when she was twenty-one, she had written in her diary, Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved, to be harvested carefully, and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty should be used like that.  To preserve the integrity of her first gift, she had looked no more for love. When the first flame and ecstasy had grown dim, sunk down, departed, she had begun preserving what? It puzzled her that she no longer knew just what she was preserving, a sentimental memory, or some profound and fundamental concept of honour. She was doubting now whether there had been any moral issue involved in her way of life, to walk unworried and unregretful along the gayest of all possible lanes, and to keep her pride by being always herself and doing what it seemed beautiful that she should do. From the first little boy in an eaten colour, whose girl she had been, down to the latest casual man, whose eyes had grown alert and appreciative as they rested upon her, there was needed only that matchless candour she could throw into a look or cloth, with an inconsequent claws, for she had always talked in broken clauses, to weave about her immeasurable illusions, immeasurable distances, immeasurable light. To create souls and men, to create fine happiness and fine despair, she must remain deeply proud, proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed. She knew that in her breast she had never wanted children. The reality, the earthiness, the intolerable sentiment of child-bearing, the menace to her beauty, had appalled her. She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving itself. Her sentimentality could cling fiercely to her own illusions, but her ironic soul whispered that motherhood was also the privilege of the female baboon. So her dreams were of ghostly children only. The early, the perfect symbols of her early and perfect love for Anthony. In the end, then, her beauty was all that had never failed her. She had never seen beauty like her own. What it meant ethically or aesthetically, faded before the gorgeous concreteness of her pink and white feet, the clean perfectness of her body, and the baby mouth that was like the material symbol of a kiss. She would be twenty-nine in February. As the long night waned, she grew supremely conscious that she and beauty were going to make use of these next three months. At first she was not sure for what, but the problem resolved itself gradually into the old lure of the screen. She was in earnest now. No material want could have moved her as this fear moved her. No matter for Anthony, Anthony, the poor in spirit, the weak and broken man with bloodshot eyes, for whom she still had moments of tenderness, no matter. She would be twenty-nine in February, a hundred days, so many days. She would go to Blockman to Mara. With the decision came relief. It cheered her that in some manner the illusion of beauty could be sustained, or preserved perhaps in celluloid, after the reality had vanished. Well, to Mara. The next day she felt weak and ill. She tried to go out and saved herself from collapse only by clinging to a mailbox near the front door. The Martinique elevator-boy helped her upstairs, and she waited on the bed for Anthony's return without energy to unhook her brazier. For five days she was down with influenza, which, just as the month turned corner into winter, ripened into double pneumonia. In the feverish perembulations of her mind she prowled through a house of bleak, unlighted rooms hunting for her mother. All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding but superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream. Odie Profanum Volgas. One day in the midst of Gloria's illness there occurred a curious incident that puzzled Miss Bagovern, the trained nurse, for some time afterward. It was noon, but the room in which the patient lay was dark and quiet. Miss Bagovern was standing near the bed, mixing some medicine, when Mrs. Patch, who had apparently been sound asleep, sat up and began to speak vehemently. "'Millions of people,' she said, swarming like rats, chattering like apes, smelling like all hell, monkeys, or lice, I suppose, for one really exquisite palace on Long Island, say, or even in Greenwich, for one palace full of pictures from the old world and exquisite things with avenues of trees and green lawns and a view of the blue sea and lovely people about in slick dresses. I'd sacrificed a hundred thousand of them, a million of them.' She raised her hand feebly and snapped her fingers. I care nothing for them. Understand me?' The look she bent upon Miss Bagovern at the conclusion of this speech was curiously elfin, curiously content.  Miss Bagovern was bewildered. She wondered what were the hundred thousand things that Mrs. Patch would sacrifice for her palace, dollars, she supposed, yet it had not sounded exactly like dollars. The Movies. It was February, seven days before her birthday, and the great snow that had filled up the cross streets as dirt fills the cracks in her floor had turned to slush and was being escorted to the gutters by the hoses of the street cleaning department. The wind, none the less bitter for being casual, whipped in through the open windows of the living room, bearing with it the dismal secrets of the area away, and clearing the patch apartment of stale smoke in its cheerless circulation. Gloria, wrapped in a warm kimono, came into the chilly room, and, picking up the telephone receiver, called Joseph Blockman. Do you mean Mr. Joseph Black? demanded the telephone girl at film's par excellence. Blockman, Joseph Blockman, B-L-O, Mr. Joseph Blockman has changed his name to Black. Do you want him? What? Yes. She remembered nervously that she had once called him Blockhead to his face. His office was reached by courtesy of two additional female voices. The last was a secretary who took her name. Only with the flow through the transmitter of his own familiar but faintly impersonal tone did she realize that it had been three years since they had met, and he had changed his name to Black. Can you see me? She suggested lightly. It's on a business matter, really. I'm going into the movies at last, if I can. I'm awfully glad. I've always thought you'd like it. Do you think you can get me a trial? She demanded, with the arrogance peculiar to all beautiful women, to all women, who have ever, at any time, considered themselves beautiful. He assured her that it was merely a question of when she wanted the trial. Any time, well, he'd phone later in the day and let her know a convenient hour. The conversation closed with conventional padding on both sides. Then from three o'clock to five she sat close to the telephone, with no result. But next morning came a note that contented and excited her. My dear Gloria, just by luck a matter came to my attention that I think will be just suited to you. I would like to see you start with something that would bring you notice. At the same time, if a very beautiful girl of your sort is put directly into a picture, next to one of the rather shop-worn stars with which every company is afflicted, tongues would very likely wag. But there is a flapper part, in a Percy B. Debris production, that I think would be just suited to you and would bring you notice. Lila Sable plays opposite Gaston Mears in a sort of character part, and your part, I believe, would be her younger sister. Anyway, Percy B. Debris, who is directing the picture, says, if you'll come to the studio's day after tomorrow, Thursday, he will run off a test. If ten o'clock is suited to you, I will meet you there at that time. With all good wishes, ever faithfully, Joseph Black. Gloria had decided that Anthony was to know nothing of this until she had obtained a definite position, and accordingly she was dressed in out of the apartment next morning before he awoke. Her mirror had given her, she thought, much the same account as ever. She wondered if there were any lingering traces of her sickness. She was still slightly underweight, and she had fancied, a few days before, that her cheeks were a trifle thinner. But she felt that those were merely transitory conditions, and that on this particular day she looked as fresh as ever. She had bought and charged a new hat, and as the day was warm she had left the leopard-skin coat at home. At the film's par excellence studios she was announced over the telephone and told that Mr. Black would be down directly. She looked around her. Two girls were being shown about by a little fat man in a slash-pocket coat, and one of them had indicated a stack of thin parcels piled breast high against the wall and extending along for twenty feet. That studio mail, explained to the fat man, pictures of the stars who were with film's par excellence. Oh. Each one's autographed by Florence Kelly or Gaston Mears or Mac Dodge. He winged confidentially, at least when Minnie Magluc out in Sock Centre gets the picture she wrote for, she thinks it's autographed. Just a stamp? Sure. It'd take him a good eight-hour day to autograph half of them. They say Murray Pickford's studio mail costs her fifty thousand a year. Say. Sure. Fifty thousand. But it's the best kind of advertising there is. They drifted out of earshot, and almost immediately Blockman appeared. Blockman, a dark, suave gentleman, gracefully engaged in the middle forties, who greeted her with courteous warmth and told her she had not changed a bit in three years. He led the way into a great hall, as large as an armory, and broken intermittently, with busy sets and blinding rows of unfamiliar light. Each piece of scenery was marked in large white letters Gaston Mears Company, Mac Dodge Company, or simply Films par excellence. Ever been in a studio before? Never have. She liked it. There was no heavy closeness of grease paint, no scent of soiled and tawdry costumes, which years before had revolted her behind the scenes of a musical comedy. This work was done in the clean mornings. The appurtences seemed rich and gorgeous and new. On a set that was joyous with men-chew hangings, a perfect Chinaman was going through a scene according to megaphone directions, as the great glittering machine ground out its ancient moral tale for the edification of the national mind. A red-headed man approached them and spoke with familiar deference to Blockman, who answered, Hello, Debris. Want you to meet Mrs. Patch? Mrs. Patch wants to go into pictures, as I explained to you. All right now, where do we go? Mr. Debris, the great Percy B. Debris, thought Gloria, showed them to a set which represented the interior of an office. Some chairs were drawn up around the camera, which stood in front of it, and the three of them sat down. Ever been in a studio before? asked Mr. Debris, giving her a glance that was surely the quintessence of keenness. No? Well, I'll explain exactly what's going to happen. We're going to take what we call a test in order to see how your features photograph, and whether you've got natural stage presence and how you respond to coaching. There's no need to be nervous over it. I'll just have the cameraman take a few hundred feet, and an episode I've got marked here in the scenario. We can tell pretty much what we want to you from that. He produced a tight-britten continuity, and explained to her the episode she was to enact. It developed that one Barbara Wainwright had been secretly married to the junior partner of the firm whose office was there represented. Entering the deserted office one day by accident, she was naturally interested in seeing where her husband worked. The telephone rang, and after some hesitation she answered it. She learned that her husband had been struck by an automobile, and instantly killed. She was overcome. At first she was unable to realize the truth, but finally she succeeded in comprehending it, and went into a dead faint on the floor. Now, that's all we want, concluded Mr. Debris. I'm going to stand here and tell you approximately what to do, and you're to act as though I wasn't here, and just go on, do it your own way. You needn't be afraid we're going to judge this too severely. We simply want to get a general idea of your screen personality. I see. You'll find makeup in the room in back of the set. Go light on it, very little red. I see, repeated Gloria, nodding. She touched her lips nervously with the tip of her tongue. The test. As she came into the set through the real wooden door and closed it carefully behind her, she found herself inconveniently dissatisfied with her clothes. She should have bought a Mrs. dress for the occasion. She could still wear them, and it might have been a good investment if it had accentuated her airy youth. Her mind snapped sharply into the momentous present as Mr. Debris' voice came from the glare of the white lights in front. You look around for your husband, now you don't see him. You're curious about the office. She became conscious of the regular sound of the camera. It worried her. She glanced toward it involuntarily, and wondered if she had made up her face correctly. Then with a definite effort she forced herself to act, and she had never felt that the gestures of her body were so banal, so awkward, so bereft of grace or distinction. She strolled around the office, picking up articles here and there, and looking at them innately. Then she scrutinized the ceiling, the floor, and thoroughly inspected an inconsequential lead pencil on the desk. Suddenly, because she could think of nothing else to do, and less than nothing to express, she forced to smile. All right, now the phone rings, tinglingling, hesitate, and then answer it. She hesitated, and then, too quickly, she thought, picked up the receiver. Hello! Her voice was hollow and unreal. The words rang in the empty set, like the ineffectualities of a ghost. The absurdities of their requirements appalled her. Did they expect that, on an instant's notice, she could put herself in the place of this preposterous and unexplained character? No, no, not yet. Now listen, John Sumner has been knocked over by an automobile and instantly killed.  Then, now hang up, with a bang. She obeyed, clung to the table with her eyes wide and staring. At length, she was feeling slightly encouraged, and her confidence increased. My God! She cried. Her voice was good, she thought. Oh, my God! Now faint. She collapsed forward to her knees, and throwing her body outward on the ground, lay without breathing. All right, called Mr. Debris. That's enough. Thank you. That's plenty.  That's enough. Gloria rose, mustering her dignity and brushing off her skirt. Awful, she remarked with a cool laugh, though her heart was bumping tumultuously. Terrible, wasn't it? Did you mind it, said Mr. Debris, smiling blandly? Did it seem hard? I can't tell anything about it until I haven't run off. Of course not, she agreed, trying to attach some sort of meaning to his remark, and failing. It was just the sort of thing he would have said had he been trying not to encourage her. A few moments later she left the studio. Blockman had promised her that she should hear the result of the test within the next few days. Too proud to force any definite comment. She felt a baffling uncertainty, and only now, when the step had at last been taken, did she realize how the possibility of a successful screen career had played in the back of her mind for the past three years. That night she tried to tell over to herself the elements that might decide for or against her, whether or not she had used enough makeup worried her, and, as the part was that of a girl of twenty, she wondered if she had not been just a little too grave. About her acting she was least of all satisfied. Her entrance had been abominable. In fact, not until she reached the phone, had she displayed a shred of poise, and then the test had been over. If they had only realized, she wished that she could try it again. A mad plan to call up in the morning and ask for a new trial took possession of her, and, as suddenly, faded. It seemed neither politic nor polite to ask another favour of Blockman. The third day of waiting found her in a highly nervous condition. She had bitten the insides of her mouth until they were raw and smarting, and burnt unbearably when she washed them with listerine. She had quarreled so persistently with Anthony that he had left the apartment in a cold fury. But because he was intimidated by her exceptional frigidity, he called up an hour afterward, apologized, and said he was having dinner at the Amsterdam Club, the only one in which he still retained membership. It was after one o'clock, and she had breakfasted at eleven, so, deciding to forego luncheon, she started for a walk in the park. At three there would be a mail. She would be back by three. It was an afternoon of premature spring. Water was drying on the walks, and in the park little girls were gravely-wheeling white doll-buggies up and down under the thin trees, while behind them followed bored nursery-maids in twos, discussing with each other those tremendous secrets that are peculiar to nursery-maids. Two o'clock by her little gold watch. She should have a new watch, one made in a platinum oblong and encrusted with diamonds. But those cost even more than squirrel coats, and of course they were out of their reach now, like everything else. Unless, perhaps, the right letter was awaiting her, in about an hour, fifty-eight minutes exactly, ten to get there left forty-eight, forty-seven now. Little girls soberly-wheeling their buggies along the damp sunny walks, the nursery-maids chattering in pairs about their inscrutable secrets. Here and there a raggedy man seated upon newspapers spread on a drying bench, related not to their radiant and delightful afternoon, but to the dingy snow that slept exhausted in obscure corners waiting for extermination. Ages later, coming into the dim hall, she saw the martinique elevator-boy standing incongruously in the light of the stained glass window. Is there any mail for us? she asked. Upstays, madame. The switchboard squawked abominably, and Gloria waited while he ministered to the telephone. She sickened as the elevator groaned its way up. The floors passed, like the slow laps of centuries, each one ominous, accusing, significant.  My dear Gloria, we had the test run off yesterday afternoon, and Mr. DeBree seemed to think that, for the part he had in mind, he needed a younger woman. He said that the acting was not bad, and there was a small character part, supposed to be a very haughty, rich widow, that he thought you might— Desolately, Gloria raised her glance until it fell out across the area away. But she found she could not see the opposite wall, for her gray eyes were full of tears. She walked into the bedroom, the letter crinkled tightly in her hand, and sank down upon her knees before the long mirror on the wardrobe floor. This was her twenty-ninth birthday, and the world was melting away before her eyes. She tried to think that it had been the makeup, but her emotions were too profound, too overwhelming, for any consolation that the thought conveyed. She strained to see, until she could feel the flesh on her temples pull forward. Yes, the cheeks were ever so faintly thin. The corners of the eyes were lined with tiny wrinkles. The eyes were different. Why, they were different. And then, suddenly, she knew how tired her eyes were. Oh, my pretty face! She whispered, passionately grieving. Oh, my pretty face! Oh, I don't want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what's happened? Then she slid toward the mirror, and, as in the test, sprawled face downward upon the floor, and lay there sobbing. It was the first awkward movement she had ever made. End of Book 3, Chapter 3, Part 1 of 2 Within another year, Anthony and Gloria had become like players who had lost their costumes, lacking the pride to continue on the note of tragedy, so that, when Mrs. and Miss Home of Kansas City cut them dead in the plaza one evening, it was only that Mrs. and Miss Home, like most people, abominated mirrors of their Adivistic selves. Their new apartment, for which they paid eighty-five dollars a month, was situated on Claremont Avenue, which is two blocks from the Hudson, in the dim hundreds. They had lived there a month when Muriel Cain came to see them late one afternoon. It was a reproachless twilight on the summer side of spring. Anthony lay upon the lounge, looking up one hundred and twenty-seventh street toward the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brumagem, umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. Across the water were the palisades, crowned by the ugly framework of the amusement-park. Yet soon it would be dusk, and those same iron cobwebs would be a glory against the heavens, an enchanted palace set over the smooth radiance of a tropical canal. The streets near the apartment, Anthony had found, were streets where children played, streets a little nicer than those he had been used to pass, on his way to Marietta, but of the same general sort, with an occasional hand organ or hurdy-gurdy, and in the cool of the evening many pairs of young girls walking down to the corner drugstore for ice-cream soda, and dreaming unlimited dreams under the low heavens. Dusk in the streets now, and children playing, shouting up incoherent ecstatic words that faded out close to the open window, and Muriel, who had come to find Gloria, chattering to him from an opaque gloom over across the room. Light the lamp, why don't we? She suggested. It's getting ghostly in here. With a tired movement he arose and obeyed. The gray window-panes vanished. He stretched himself. He was heavier now. His stomach was a limp weight against his belt. His flesh had softened and expanded. He was thirty-two, and his mind was a bleak and disordered wreck. Have a little drink, Muriel? Not me, thanks. I don't use it any more. What are you doing these days, Anthony? She asked curiously. Well, I've been pretty busy with this lawsuit. He answered indifferently. It's gone to the Court of Appeals, ought to be settled up one way or the other by autumn. There's been some objection as to whether the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over the matter. Muriel made a clicking sound with her tongue, and cocked her head on one side. Well, you tell him. I never heard of anything taking so long. Oh, they all do, he replied listlessly. All will cases. They say it's exceptional to have one settled under four or five years. Oh! Muriel daringly changed her tack.  At what? He demanded abruptly. Why, at anything, I suppose. You're still a young man. If that's encouragement, I'm much obliged, he answered dryly. And then, with sudden wariness, does it bother you particularly that I don't want to work? It doesn't bother me, but it does bother a lot of people who claim, Oh, God, he said, brokenly. It seems to me that for three years I've heard nothing about myself but wild stories and virtuous admonitions. I'm tired of it. If you don't want to see us, let us alone. I don't bother my former friends, but I need no charity calls, and no criticism disguised as good advice. Then he added, apologetically, I'm sorry, but really, Muriel, you mustn't talk like a lady slumworker, even if you are visiting the lower middle classes. He turned his bloodshot eyes on her reproachfully. Eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue, that were weak now, strained and half-ruined from reading when he was drunk. Why do you say such awful things? She protested. You talk as if you and Gloria were in the middle classes. Why pretend we're not? I hate people who claim to be great aristocrats when they can't even keep up the appearances of it. Do you think a person has to have money to be aristocratic? Muriel, the horrified Democrat. Why, of course. Aristocracies only in admission that certain traits, which we call fine, courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing, can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity. Muriel bit her lower lip and waved her head from side to side. Well, all I say is that if a person comes from a good family, they're always nice people. That's the trouble with you and Gloria. You think that just because things aren't going your way right now, all your old friends are trying to avoid you.  As a matter of fact, said Anthony, you know nothing at all about it. With me it's simply a matter of pride, and for once Gloria is reasonable enough to agree that we oughtn't go where we're not wanted, and people don't want us, we're too much the ideal bad examples. Nonsense! You can't park your pessimism in my little sudden parlor. I think you ought to forget all those morbid speculations and go to work. Here I am, thirty-two. Suppose I did start in at some idiotic business. Perhaps in two years I might rise to fifty dollars a week, with luck. That's if I could get a job at all. There's an awful lot of unemployment. Well, suppose I made fifty a week. Do you think I'd be any happier? Do you think that if I don't get this money of my grandfathers, life will be endurable?" Muriel smiled complacently. Well, she said, that may be clever, but it isn't common sense. A few minutes later Gloria came in, seeming to bring with her into the room some dark colour, indeterminate and rare. In a taciturn way she was happy to see Muriel. She greeted Anthony with a casual, "'Hi!' "'I've been talking philosophy with your husband,' cried the irrepressible Miss Cain. "'We took up some fundamental concepts,' said Anthony, a faint smile disturbing his pale cheeks, pale or still under two days growth of beard. Oblivious to his irony, Muriel rehashed her contention. When she had done, Gloria said quietly, "'Anthony's right. There's no fun to go around when you have the sense that people are looking at you in a certain way.' He broke in plaintively. "'Don't you think that when even Maury Noble, who was my best friend, won't come to see us, it's high time to stop calling people up?' Tears were standing in his eyes. "'That was your fault about Maury Noble,' said Gloria coolly. "'It wasn't.' "'It most certainly was.' Muriel intervened quickly. "'I met a girl who knew Maury the other day, and she says he doesn't drink any more. He's getting pretty cagey.' "'Doesn't?' "'Practically not at all. He's making piles of money. He's sort of changed since the war. He's going to marry a girl in Philadelphia who has millions. Sessy Larrabee. Anyway, that's what the town tattle said.' "'He's thirty-three,' said Anthony, thinking aloud. "'But it's odd to imagine his getting married. I used to think he was so brilliant. He was,' murmured Gloria, in a way. "'But brilliant people don't settle down in business, or do they? Or what do they do? Or what becomes of everybody you used to know and have so much in common with?' "'You drift apart,' suggested Muriel with the appropriate, dreamy look. "'They change,' said Gloria. All the qualities that they don't use in their daily lives get cobwebbed up. "'The last thing he said to me,' recollected Anthony, was that he was going to work so as to forget there was nothing worth working for.' Muriel caught it this quickly. "'That's what you ought to do,' she exclaimed triumphantly. "'Of course I shouldn't think anybody would want to work for nothing, but it'd give you something to do. What do you do with yourselves, anyway? Nobody ever sees you at non-montra or anywhere. Are you economizing?' Gloria laughed scornfully, glancing at Anthony from the corners of her eyes. "'Well,' he demanded, "'what are you laughing at? You know what I'm laughing at,' she answered coldly. "'At that case of whiskey?' "'Yes,' she turned to Muriel. He paid seventy-five dollars for a case of whiskey yesterday. "'What if I did? It's cheaper that way than if you get it by the bottle. You needn't pretend that you won't drink any of it. At least I don't drink in the daytime.' "'That's a fine distinction,' he cried, springing to his feet in a weak rage. "'What's more, I'll be damned if you can hurl that at me every few minutes.' "'It's true.  He had worked himself up to such a state that his arms and shoulders were visibly trembling. "'You'd think everything was my fault. You'd think you hadn't encouraged me to spend money, and spent a lot more on yourself than I ever did by a long shot.' Now Gloria rose to her feet. I won't let you talk to me that way. "'All right, then. By heaven you don't have to.' In a sort of rush he left the room. The two women heard his steps in the hall, and then the front door banged. Gloria sank back into her chair. Her face was lovely in the lamp-light, composed, inscrutable. "'Oh,' cried Muriel, in distress, "'oh, what is the matter?' Nothing particularly. He's just drunk. "'Drunk? Why, he's perfectly sober. He talked.' Gloria shook her head. "'Oh, no. He doesn't show it any more unless he can hardly stand up. And he talks all right until he gets excited. He talks much better than he does when he's sober. But he's been sitting here all day drinking, except for the time it took him to walk to the corner for a newspaper. "'Oh, how terrible!'  "'Has this happened much?' "'Drinking, you mean?' "'No, this. Leaving you.' "'Oh, yes, frequently. He'll come in about midnight, and weep and ask me to forgive him.' "'And do you?' "'I don't know. We just go on.' The two women sat there in the lamp-light and looked at each other, each in a different way helpless before this thing. Gloria was still pretty, as pretty as she would ever be again. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was wearing a new dress that she had bought, imprudently, for fifty dollars. She had hoped she could persuade Anthony to take her out tonight, to a restaurant or even to one of the great gorgeous moving picture-palaces where there would be a few people to look at her, at whom she could bear it to look in turn. She wanted this because she knew her cheeks were flushed, and because her dress was new and becomingly fragile. Only very occasionally, now, did they receive any invitations, but she did not tell these things to Muriel. "'Gloria, dear, I wish we could have dinner together, but I promised a man, and—it's seven-thirty already—I've got to tear. Oh, I couldn't anyway. In the first place, I've been ill all day. I couldn't eat a thing.' After she had walked with Muriel to the door, Gloria came back into the room, turned out the lamp, and, leaning her elbows on the window sill, looked out at Palisade's Park, where the brilliant revolving circle of the Ferris wheel was like a trembling mirror catching the yellow reflection of the moon. The street was quiet now. The children had gone in. Over the way she could see a family at dinner. Pointlessly, ridiculously, they rose and walked about the table. Seen thus, all that they did appeared incongruous. It was as though they were being jiggled carelessly and to no purpose by invisible overhead wires. She looked at her watch. It was eight o'clock. She had been pleased for a part of the day, in the early afternoon, in walking along that Broadway of Harlem, one hundred and twenty- fifth street, with her nostrils alert to many odours, and her mind excited by the extraordinary beauty of some Italian children. It affected her curiously, as Fifth Avenue had affected her once, in the days when, with the placid confidence of beauty, she had known that it was all hers, every shop and all it held, every adult toy glittering in a window, all hers for the asking. Here on one hundred and twenty-fifth street there were salvation army bands and spectrum-shald old ladies on doorsteps, and sugary, sticky candy in the grimy hands of shiny-haired children, and the late sun striking down on the sides of the tall tenements, all very rich and racy in savoury, like a dish by a provident French chef one could not help enjoying, even though one knew that the ingredients were probably leftovers. Gloria shuddered suddenly, as a river siren came moaning over the dusky roofs, and leaning back in till the ghostly curtains fell from her shoulder, she turned on the electric lamp. It was growing late. She knew there was some change in her purse, and she considered whether she would go down and have some coffee and rolls, where the liberated subway made a roaring cave of Manhattan Street, or eat the deviled ham and bread in the kitchen. Her purse decided for her, it contained a nickel and two pennies. After an hour the silence of the room had grown unbearable, and she found that her eyes were wandering from her magazine to the ceiling, toward which she stared without thought. Suddenly she stood up, hesitated for a moment, biting at her finger. Then she went to the pantry, took down a bottle of whiskey from the shelf, and poured herself a drink. She filled up the glass with ginger ale, and, returning to her chair, finished an article in the magazine. It concerned the last revolutionary widow, who, when a young girl, had married an ancient veteran of the Continental Army, and who had died in 1906. It seemed strange and oddly romantic to Gloria that she and this woman had been contemporaries. She turned the page, and learned that a candidate for Congress was being accused of atheism by an opponent. Gloria's surprise vanished when she found that the charges were false. The candidate had merely denied the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He admitted, under pressure, that he gave full credence to the stroll upon the water. Finishing her first drink, Gloria got herself a second. After slipping on her negligee and making herself comfortable on the lounge, she became conscious that she was miserable, and that the tears were rolling down her cheeks. She wondered if they were tears of self-pity, and tried resolutely not to cry. But this existence, without hope, without happiness, oppressed her. And she kept shaking her head from side to side, her mouth drawn down tremulously in the corners, as though she were denying an assertion made by some one somewhere. She did not know that this gesture of hers was years older than the history, that, for a hundred generations of men, intolerable and persistent grief has offered that gesture of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more profound, more powerful than the God made in the image of man, and before which that God, did he exist, would be equally impotent. It is a truth set at the heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never answers, this force intangible as air, more definite than death. Richard Carmel Early in the summer Anthony resigned from his last club, the Amsterdam. He had come to visit it hardly twice a year, and the dues were of recurrent burden. He had joined it on his return from Italy because it had been his grandfather's club and his father's, and because it was a club that, given the opportunity, one indisputably joined. But as a matter of fact he had preferred the Harvard club, largely because of Dick and More. However, with a decline of his fortunes, it had seemed an increasingly desirable bobble to cling to. It was relinquished at the last, with some regret. His companions numbered now a curious dozen. Several of them he had met in a place called Sammys on 43rd Street, where, if one knocked on the door and were favourably passed on from behind a grating, one could sit around a great round table drinking fairly good whisky. It was here that he encountered a man named Parker Allison, who had been exactly the wrong sort of rounder at Harvard, and who was running through a large yeast fortune as rapidly as possible. Parker Allison's notion of distinction consisted in driving a noisy red and yellow racing car up Broadway with two glittering hard-eyed girls beside him. He was the sort who dined with two girls rather than one. His imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialogue. Besides Allison there was Pete Lytell, who wore a gray derby on the side of his head. He always had money, and he was customarily cheerful, so Anthony held aimless, long-winded conversation with him through many afternoons of the summer and fall. Lytell, he found, not only talked but reasoned in phrases. His philosophy was a series of them, assimilated here and there through an active, thoughtless life. He had phrases about socialism, the immemorial ones. He had phrases pertaining to the existence of a personal deity, something about one time when he had been in a railroad accident. And he had phrases about the Irish problem, the sort of woman he respected, and the futility of prohibition. The only time his conversation ever rose superior to these muddled clauses with which he interpreted the most rococo happenings in a life that had been more than usually eventful, was when he got down to the detailed discussion of his most animal existence. He knew, to a subtlety, the foods, the liquor, and the women that he preferred. He was at once the commonest and most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street, and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art, and he was a virtual moron, performing stately, yet absurdly, a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of three score years. With men such as these two, Anthony Patz drank and discussed and drank and argued. He liked them because they knew nothing about him, because they lived in the obvious and had not the faintest conception of the inevitable continuity of life. They sat not before a motion picture with consecutive reels, but at a musty old-fashioned travelogue, with all values stark and hence all implications confused. Yet they themselves were not confused, because there was nothing in them to be confused. They changed phrases from month to month as they changed neckties. Anthony, the courteous, the subtle, the perspicacious, was drunk each day in sammies with these men, in the apartment over a book some book he knew, and, very rarely, with Gloria, who, in his eyes, had begun to develop the unmistakable outlines of a quarrelsome and unreasonable woman. She was not the Gloria of old, certainly. The Gloria who, had she been sick, wouldn't have preferred to inflict misery upon everyone around her rather than confess that she needed sympathy or assistance. She was not above whining now. She was not above being sorry for herself. Each night, when she prepared for bed, she smeared her face with some new unjunt which she hoped, illogically, would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty. When Anthony was drunk he taunted her about this. When he was sober he was polite to her, on occasions even tender. He seemed to show, for short hours, a trace of that old quality of understanding, too well to blame, that quality which was the best of him, and had worked swiftly and ceaselessly toward his ruin. But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down, which, in every metropolis, is most in evidence through the unstable middle class. Unable to live with the rich, he thought that his next choice would have been to live with the very poor. Anything was better than this cup of perspiration and tears. The sense of the enormous panorama of life, never strong in Anthony, had become dim almost to extinction. At long intervals now some incident, some gesture of glories, would take his fancy, but the gray veils had come down and earnest upon him. As he grew older those things faded. After that there was wine. There was a kindness about intoxication. There was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal building, its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold in dreaming against the inaccessible sky, and Wall Street, the crass, the banal. Again it was the triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle. It was where the great kings kept the money for their wars. The fruit of youth, or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness, the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined. As he stood in front of Delmonico's, lighting a cigarette one night, he saw two handsoms drawn up close to the curb, waiting for a chance drunken fair. The outmoded calves were worn and dirty. The cracked patent leather wrinkled like an old man's face. The cushions faded to a brownish lavender. The very horses were ancient and weary. So were the white-haired men who sat aloft, cracking their whips with a grotesque affectation of gallantry, a relic of vanished gaiety. Anthony Patch walked away in a sudden fit of depression, pondering the bitterness of such survivals. There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure. On 42nd Street one afternoon he met Richard Caramel for the first time in many months, a prosperous, fattening Richard Caramel, whose face was filling out to match the Bostonian brow. "'Just got in this week from the coast. Was going to call you up, but I didn't know your new address.' We've moved." Richard Caramel noticed that Anthony was wearing a soiled shirt, that his cuffs were slightly but perceptibly frayed, that his eyes were set in half-moons the color of cigar smoke. "'So I gathered,' he said, fixing his friend with his bright yellow eye. "'But where and how is Gloria? My God, Anthony, I've been hearing the dog-gondous stories about you too, even out in California. And when I get back to New York, I find you've sunk absolutely out of sight. Why don't you pull yourself together?' "'Now listen,' chattered Anthony, unsteadily, "'I can't stand a long lecture. We've lost money in a dozen ways, and naturally people have talked. On account of the lawsuit, but the thing's coming to a final decision this winter, surely. You're talking so fast that I can't understand you,' interrupted Dick calmly. "'Well, I've said all I'm going to say,' snapped Anthony. "'Come and see us if you like, or don't.' With this he turned and started to walk off in the crowd. But Dick overtook him suddenly and grasped his arm. "'Say, Anthony, don't fly off the handle so easily. You know Gloria's my cousin, and you're one of my oldest friends, so it's natural for me to be interested when I hear that you're going to the dogs and taking her with you. "'I don't want to be preached to.' "'Well, then, all right. How about coming up to my apartment and having a drink? I've just got settled. I've bought three cases of Gordon Jinn from a revenue officer.' As they walked along, he continued in a burst of exasperation. "'And how about your grandfather's money?  You know, it might make a slight difference, for instance, if some judge thought that Adam Patch made it harder for him to get liquor. "'You can't do without money,' said Dick, sententiously. "'Have you tried to write any, lately?' Anthony shook his head silently. "'That's funny,' said Dick.  The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view. The success because he's exceeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father's mistakes. "'I don't agree with you,' said the author of a shavetail in France. "'I used to listen to you and Maury when we were young, and I used to be impressed because you were so consistently cynical. But now—well, after all, by God, which of us three has taken to the—' "'To the intellectual life? I don't want to sound vanglorious, but—' "'It's me, and I've always believed that moral values existed, and I always will.' "'Well,' objected Anthony, who was rather enjoying himself. Even granting that, you know that, in practice, life never presents problems as clear-cut, does it? "'It does to me. There's nothing I'd violate certain principles for. "'But how do you know when you're violating them? You have to guess at things, just like most people do. You have to apportion the values when you look back. You finish up the portrait, then paint in the details and shadows.'  "'Same old feudal cynic,' he said. "'It's just a mode of being sorry for yourself. You don't do anything, so nothing matters.' "'Oh, I'm quite capable of self-pity,' admitted Anthony, nor am I claiming that I'm getting as much fun out of life as you are.' "'You say, at least you used to, that happiness is the only thing worthwhile in life. Do you think you're any happier for being a pessimist?' Anthony grunted savagely. His pleasure in the conversation began to wane. He was nervous and craving for a drink. "'My golly,' he cried. "'Where do you live? I can't keep walking forever.' "'Your endurance is all mental, eh?' returned Dick sharply. "'Well, I live right here.' He turned in at the apartment house on 49th Street, and a few minutes later they were in a large new room with an open fireplace and four walls lined with books. A coloured butler served them gin rickies, and an hour vanished politely with the mellow shortening of their drinks and the glow of a light mid-autumn fire. "'The arts are very old,' said Anthony, after a while. With the few glasses the tension of his nerves relaxed, and he found that he could think again. "'Which art?' All of them. Poetry is dying fast. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the coloured and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention, poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that's never been beautiful before. Beauty is the sum of several beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can't go any further, except in the novel, perhaps.' Rick interrupted him impatiently. "'You know these new novels make me tired. My God, everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read this side of Paradise. Are our girls really like that? If it's true to life, which I don't believe, the next generation is going to the dogs.  I think there's a place for the romanticist in literature.' Anthony tried to remember what he had read lately of Richard Caramel's. There was a shavetail in France. A novel called The Land of Strong Men, and several dozen short stories which were even worse. It had become the custom among young and clever reviewers to mention Richard Caramel with a smile of scorn. Mr. Richard Caramel, they called him. His corpse was dragged obscenely through every literary supplement. He was accused of making a great fortune by writing trash for the movies. As the fashion in books shifted, he was becoming almost a byword of contempt. While Anthony was thinking this, Dick had got to his feet, and seemed to be hesitating at an avowal. I've gathered quite a few books, he said suddenly. So I see. I've made an exhaustive collection of good American stuff, old and new. I don't mean the usual long-fellow wittier thing, in fact most of it's modern. He stepped to one of the walls, and, seeing that it was expected of him, Anthony arose and followed. Look! Under a printed tag, Americana, he displayed six long rows of books, beautifully bound, and, obviously, carefully chosen. And here are the contemporary novelists. Then Anthony saw the Joker. Wedged in between Mark Twain and Dreiser, were eight strange and inappropriate volumes, the works of Richard Caramel, the demon lover, true enough, but also seven others that were exacrally awful, without sincerity or grace. Unwillingly, Anthony glanced at Dick's face, and caught a slight uncertainty there. I've put my own books in, of course, said Richard Caramel hastily, though one or two of them are uneven. I'm afraid I wrote a little too fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don't believe in false modesty. Of course some of the critics haven't paid so much attention to me, since I've been established. But after all, it's not the critics that count. They're just sheep. For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, he felt a touch of the old, pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard Caramel continued, My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackeray of America because of my New York novel. Yes, Anthony managed to muster. I suppose there's a good deal on what you say. He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He knew that he would have changed places with Dick unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well then. Man disparaged his life work so readily. And that night, while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great hitings of the wrong keys and screwings up of his weary unmatched eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours when the fire dies down and the head is swimming from the effect of prolonged concentration, Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back seat of a taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue. End of Book 3, Chapter 3, Part 1 of 2 The Beating As winter approached, it seemed that a sort of madness seized upon Anthony. He awoke in the morning, so nervous, that Gloria could feel him trembling in the bed, before he could muster enough vitality to stumble into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now, except under the influence of liquor. And as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria's soul and body shrank away from him, when he stayed out all night as he did several times. She not only failed to be sorry, but even felt a measure of dismal relief. Next day he would be faintly repentant, and would remark, in a gruff, hang-dog fashion, that he guessed he was drinking a little too much. For hours at a time he would sit in the great armchair that had been in his apartment, lost in a sort of stupor. Even his interest in reading his favourite books seemed to have departed, and though an incessant bickering went on between husband and wife, the one subject upon which they ever really conversed, was the progress of the will-case. What Gloria hoped in the tenebrous depths of her soul, which she expected that great gift of money to bring about, is difficult to imagine. She was being bent by her environment into a grotesque similitude of a housewife. She, who until three years before had never made coffee, prepared sometimes three meals a day. She walked a great deal in the afternoons, and in the evening she read, books, magazines, anything she found at hand. If now she wished for a child, even a child of the Anthony who sought her bed blind drunk, she neither said so, nor gave any show or sign of interest in children. It is doubtful if she could have made it clear to anyone what it was she wanted, or indeed what there was to want. A lonely, lovely woman, thirty now, retrenched behind some impregnable inhibition born and co-existent with her beauty. One afternoon, when the snow was dirty again, a long riverside drive, Gloria, who had been to the grocers, entered the apartment to find Anthony pacing the floor in a state of aggravated nervousness.  For a moment she received the impression that he was suddenly indefinitely old. Have you any money? he inquired of her precipitately. What? What do you mean? Just what I said. Money, money. Can't you speak English? She paid no attention, but brushed by him and into the pantry to put the bacon and eggs in the ice-box. When his drinking had been unusually excessive, he was invariably in a whining mood. This time he followed her, and, standing in the pantry door, persisted in his question. Have you heard what I said? Have you any money? She turned about from the ice-box and faced him. Why, Anthony, you must be crazy! You know I haven't any money, except a dollar in change. He executed an abrupt about-face and returned to the living-room, where he renewed his pacing. It was evident that he had something portentous on his mind. He quite obviously wanted to be asked what was the matter. Joining him a moment later, she sat upon the long lounge and began taking down her hair. It was no longer bobbed, and it had changed in the last year, from a rich gold dusted with red to an unresplendent light brown. She had bought some shampoo-soap and meant to wash it now. She had considered putting a bottle of peroxide into the rinsing-water. Well, she implied silently. That darn bank! He quavered. They've had my account for over ten years. Ten years! Well, it seems they've got some autocratic rule that you have to keep over five hundred dollars there, or they won't carry you. They wrote me a letter a few months ago, and told me I'd been running too low. Once I gave out two bum checks—remember, the knight and reason-weavers?—but I made them good the very next day. Well, I promised old Halloran—he's a manager, the greedy mick—that I'd watch out. And I thought I was going all right. I kept up the stubs in my check-book, pretty regular. Well, I went in there to cash a check, and Halloran came up and told me they'd have to close my account. Too many bad checks, he said, and I never had more than five hundred to my credit, and that only for a day or so at a time. And by God! What do you think he said then? What? He said this was a good time to do it because I didn't have a damn penny in there. You didn't? That's what he told me. Seems I'd given these bijros people a check for sixty for that last case of liquor, and I only had forty-five dollars in the bank. Well, the bijros people deposited fifteen dollars to my account and drew the whole thing out. In her ignorance, Gloria conjured up a specter of imprisonment and disgrace. Oh, they won't do anything, he assured her. Boot leggings too risky a business. They'll send me a bill for fifteen dollars and I'll pay it. Oh! She considered a moment. Well, we can sell another bond. He laughed sarcastically. Oh yes, that's always easy. When the few bonds we have that are paying any interest at all are only worth between fifty and eighty cents on the dollar, we lose about half the bond every time we sell. What else can we do? Oh, we'll sell something, as usual. We've got paper worth eighty thousand dollars at par. Again he laughed, unpleasantly. Bring about thirty thousand on the open market. I distrusted those ten percent investments. The deuce you did, he said. You pretended you did, so you could clot me if they went to pieces, but you wanted to take a chance as much as I did. She was silent a moment, as if considering, then. Anthony, she cried suddenly, two hundred a month is worse than nothing. Let's sell all the bonds and put the thirty thousand dollars in the bank, and if we lose the case we can live in Italy for three years and then just die. In her excitement, as she talked, she was aware of a faint flush of sentiment, the first she had felt in many days. Three years, he said nervously. Three years? You're crazy. Mr. Hadell take more than that if we lose. Do you think he's working for charity? I forgot that. And here it is Saturday, he continued, and I've only got a dollar and some change, and we've got to live till Monday when I can get to my brokers, and not a drink in the house, he added, as a significant afterthought. Can't you call up Dick? I did. His man says he's gone down to Princeton to address a literary club or some such thing, won't be back till Monday. Well, let's see, don't you know some friend you might go to? I've tried a couple of fellows, couldn't find anybody in. I wish I'd sold that Keith's letter like I started to last week. How about those men you play cards with in that Sammy place? Do you think I'd ask them? His voice rang with righteous horror. Gloria winced. He would rather contemplate her active discomfort than feel his own skin crawl at asking an inappropriate favour. I thought of Muriel, he suggested. She's in California. Well, how about some of those men who gave you such a good time while I was in the army? You'd think they might be glad to do a little favour for you. She looked at him contemptuously, but he took no notice. Or how about your old friend Rachel, or Constance Merriam? Constance Merriam's been dead a year, and I wouldn't ask Rachel. Well, how about that gentleman who was so anxious to help you once that he could hardly restrain himself, Blockman? Oh! He had hurt her at last, and he was not too obtuse or too careless to perceive it. Why not him? He insisted callously. Because he doesn't like me any more, she said with difficulty. And then, as he did not answer, but only regarded her cynically, if you want to know why I'll tell you. A year ago I went to Blockman, he's changed his name to Black, and asked him to put me into pictures. You went to Blockman? Yes. Why didn't you tell me? He demanded incredulously, the smile fading from his face.  He had them give me a test, and they decided that I wasn't young enough for anything except a character part. A character part? A woman of thirty sort of thing. I wasn't thirty, and I didn't think I looked thirty. Why, damn him! cried Anthony, championing her violently with a curious perverseness of emotion. Why? Well, that's why I can't go to him. Why, the insolence! insisted Anthony nervously. The insolence! Anthony, that doesn't matter now. The thing is, we've got to live over Sunday, and there's nothing in the house but a loaf of bread and a half pound of bacon and two eggs for breakfast. She handed him the contents of her purse. There's seventy, eighty, a dollar fifteen, with what you have that makes about two and a half altogether, doesn't it? Anthony, we can get along on that. We can buy lots of food with that, more than we can possibly eat. Jiggling the change in his hand, he shook his head. No, I've got to have a drink. I'm so darn nervous that I'm shivering. A thought struck him. Perhaps Sammy had cash a check, and then Monday I could rush down to the bank with the money. But they've closed your account. That's right, that's right, I'd forgotten. I'll tell you what, I'll go down to Sammy's and I'll find somebody there who'll lend me something. I hate like the devil to ask them, though. He snapped his fingers suddenly. I know what I'll do. I'll hawk my watch. I can get twenty dollars on it and get it back before Monday for sixty cents extra. It's been hawked before, when I was at Cambridge. He had put on his overcoat, and with a brief goodbye he started down the hall toward the outer door. Gloria got to her feet. It had suddenly occurred to her where he would probably go first. Anthony, she called after him, hadn't you better leave two dollars with me? I only need car fare. The outer door slammed. He had pretended not to hear her. She stood for a moment, looking after him. Then she went into the bathroom, among her tragic ungeons, and began preparations for washing her hair. Down at Sammy's he found Parker Allison and Pete Lytell sitting alone at a table, drinking whiskey-sours. It was just after six o'clock, and Sammy, or Samuel Bendiri, as he had been christened, was sweeping an accumulation of cigarette butts and broken glass into a corner. Hi, Tony, called Parker Allison to Anthony. Sometimes he addressed him as Tony, at other times it was Dan. To him all Anthony's must sail under one of these diminatives. Sit down, what do you have? On the subway Anthony had counted his money and found that he had almost four dollars. He could pay for two rounds at fifty cents a drink, which meant that he would have six drinks. Then he would go over to Sixth Avenue and get twenty dollars and a pond ticket in exchange for his watch. Well, rough necks, he said jovially, how's the life of crime? Pretty good, said Allison. He winked at Pete Lytell.  We've got some pretty good stuff lined up for about eleven o'clock when the show's let out. Oh boy! Yes, sir. Too bad he's married, isn't it, Pete? Such shame. At half-past seven, when they had completed the six rounds, Anthony found that his intentions were giving audience to his desires. He was happy and cheerful now, thoroughly enjoying himself. It seemed to him that the story which Pete had just finished telling was unusually and profoundly humorous, and he decided, as he did every day at about this point, that they were damn good fellows by golly who would do a lot more for him than anyone else he knew. The pawn-shops would remain open until late Saturday nights, and he felt that if he took just one more drink he would attain a gorgeous rose-coloured exhilaration. Artfully, he fished in his vest pockets, brought up his two quarters, and stared at them as though in surprise. Well, I'll be darned, he protested in an aggrieved tone. Here I've come out without my pocket-book. Need some cash? Asked Lytell easily. I left my money on the dresser at home, and I wanted to buy you another drink. Oh, Noggett, Lytell waved the suggestion away disparagingly. I guess we can blow a good fella to all the drinks he wants. What do you have, same? I tell you, suggested Parker Allison. Suppose we send Sammy across the street for some sandwiches, and eat dinner here. The other two agreed. Good idea. Hey, Sammy, why don't you do something for us? Just after nine o'clock, Anthony staggered to his feet, and, bidding them a thick good night, walked unsteadily to the door, handing Sammy one of his two quarters as he passed out. Once in the street, he hesitated uncertainly, and then started in the direction of Sixth Avenue, where he remembered to have frequently passed several loan offices.  Unperturbed he continued. Another one, half a block down, was also closed. So were two more across the street, and a fifth in the square below. Seeing a faint light in the last one, he began to knock on the glass door. He desisted only when a watchman appeared in the back of the shop, and motioned him, angrily, to move on. With growing discouragement, with growing befuddlement, he crossed the street, and walked back toward forty-third. On the corner near Sammy's, he paused, undecided. If he went back to the apartment, as he felt his body required, he would lay himself open to bitter reproach, yet, now that the pawn-shops were closed, he had no notion where to get the money. He decided, finally, that he might ask Parker Allison after all. But he approached Sammy's, only to find the door locked, and the lights out. He looked at his watch, nine-thirty. He began walking. Ten minutes later, he stopped aimlessly at the corner of forty-third in Madison Avenue, diagonally across from the bright, but nearly deserted entrance to the Biltmore Hotel. Here he stood for a moment, and then sat down heavily on a damp board amid some debris of construction work. He rested there for almost half an hour, his mind a shifting pattern of surface thoughts, chieftest among which were that he must obtain some money, and get home before he became too sodden to find his way. Then, glancing over toward the Biltmore, he saw a man standing directly under the overhead glow of the Port Corsair lamps beside a woman in an Irmine coat. As Anthony watched, the couple moved forward and signalled to a taxi. Anthony perceived, by the infallible identification that lurks in the walk of a friend, that it was Maury Noble. He rose to his feet. Maury! he shouted. Maury looked in his direction, then turned back to the girl, just as the taxi came up into place. With the chaotic idea of borrowing ten dollars, Anthony began to run as fast as he could across Madison Avenue and along forty-third street. As he came up, Maury was standing beside the yawning door of the taxi cab. His companion turned and looked curiously at Anthony. Hello, Maury! he said, holding out his hand. How are you? Fine, thank you. Their hands dropped, and Anthony hesitated. Maury made no move to introduce him, but only stood there regarding him with an inscrutable feline silence. I wanted to see you, began Anthony, uncertainly. He did not feel that he could ask for a loan with the girl not four feet away, so he broke off and made a perceptible motion of his head as if to beckon Maury to one side. I mean rather a big hurry, Anthony. I know, but can you—can you? Again he hesitated. I'll see you some other time, said Maury. It's important. I'm sorry, Anthony. Before Anthony could make up his mind to blurt out his request, Maury had turned coolly to the girl, helped her into the car, and, with the polite, good evening, stepped in after her. As he nodded from the window, it seemed to Anthony that his expression had not changed by a shade or a hair. Then with a fretful clatter the taxi moved off, and Anthony was left standing there alone under the lights. Anthony went on into the Biltmore, for no reason in particular, except that the entrance was at hand, and ascending the wide stare found a seat in an alcove. He was furiously aware that he had been snubbed. He was as hurt and angry as it was possible for him to be when in that condition. Nevertheless, he was stubbornly preoccupied with the necessity of obtaining some money before he went home, and once again he told over on his fingers the acquaintances he might conceivably call on in this emergency. He thought, eventually, that he might approach Mr. Halland, his broker, at his home. After a long wait he found that Mr. Halland was out. He returned to the operator, leaning over her desk and fingering his quarter as though loath to leave unsatisfied. "'Call Mr. Blockman,' he said suddenly. His own words surprised him. The name had come from some crossing of two suggestions in his mind. "'What's the number, please?' Scarcely conscious of what he did, Anthony looked up Joseph Blockman in the telephone directory. He could find no such person, and was about to close the book when it flashed into his mind that Gloria had mentioned a change of name. It was the matter of a minute to find Joseph Black. Then he waited in the booth while Central dialed the number. "'Hello, Mr. Blockman? I mean Mr. Blackin?' "'No, he's out this evening. Is there any message?' The intonation was cockney. It reminded him of the rich vocal differences of bounds. "'Where is he?' "'Why, uh, who is this, please, sir?' "'This Mr. Patch. Matter of vital importance. Why, he's with a party at the Boule-Mitch, sir. Thanks.' Anthony got his five cents change and started for the Boule-Mitch, a popular dancing resort on forty-fifth Street. It was nearly ten, but the streets were dark and sparsely peopled until the theatres should eject their spawn an hour later. Anthony knew the Boule-Mitch, for he had been there with Gloria during the year before, and he remembered the existence of a rule that patrons must be in evening dress. Well, he would not go upstairs. He would send a boy up for Blockman and wait for him in the lower hall. For a moment he did not doubt that the whole project was entirely natural and graceful. To his distorted imagination Blockman had become simply one of his old friends. The entrance hall of the Boule-Mitch was warm. There were high yellow lights over a thick green carpet, from the centre of which a white stairway rose to the dancing floor. Anthony spoke to the hall-boy. "'I want to see Mr. Blockman, Mr. Black,' he said. "'He's upstairs, have him paged.' The boy shook his head. It's against the rules to have him paged. You know what table he's at? No, but I've got to see him. Wait, and I'll get you a waiter.' After a short interval a head-waiter appeared, bearing a card on which were charted the table reservations. He darted a cynical look at Anthony, which, however, failed of its target. Together they bent over the card-board and found the table without difficulty. A party of eight, Mr. Black's own. "'Tell him, Mr. Patch, very, very important.' Again he waited, leaning against the banister, and listening to the confused harmonies of jasmad, which came floating down the stairs. A Czech girl near him was singing. "'Out in the shimmy sanatorium, the jasmad nuts reside. Out in the shimmy sanatorium, I left my blushing bride. She went and shook herself insane, so let her shiver back again.' Then he saw Blockman descending the staircase, and took a step forward to meet him and shake hands. "'You wanted to see me?' said the older man, coolly. "'Yes,' answered Anthony, nodding. "'Personal manner. Can you just step over here?' Regarding him narrowly, Blockman followed Anthony to a half-bend, made by the staircase where they were beyond observation or earshot of anyone entering or leaving the restaurant. "'Well,' he inquired, "'wanted to talk to you. What about?'  He intended it to sound casual. "'What do you want to talk to me about?' repeated Blockman. "'What's Harry, old man?' He tried to lay his hand in a friendly gesture upon Blockman's shoulder. But the latter drew away slightly. "'Have been.' "'Very well, thanks. See here, Mr. Patch, I've got a party upstairs. They'll think it's rude if I stay away too long. What was it you wanted to see me about?' For the second time that evening, Anthony's mind made an abrupt jump, and what he said was not at all what he intended to say. "'I understand you kept my wife out of the movies.' "'What?' Blockman's ready face darkened in parallel planes of shadows. "'You heard me.' "'Look here, Mr. Patch,' said Blockman, evenly, and without changing his expression. You're drunk. You're disgustingly and insultingly drunk.' "'Not too drunk talk to you?' He insisted, Anthony, with a leer, "'First place. My wife wants nothing whatever to do with you. Never did. Understand me?' "'Be quiet,' said the older man angrily, "'I should think you'd respect your wife enough not to bring her into the conversation under these circumstances.' "'Nurr, you mind how I expect my wife. One thing. You leave her alone. You go to hell.' "'See here.  He took two paces forward, as though to pass by. But Anthony stepped in his way. "'Not so fast, you got to him, Jew!' For a moment they stood, regarding each other. Anthony swaying gently from side to side, Blockman almost trembling with fury. Be careful,' he cried in a strange voice. "'Anthony might have remembered, then, a certain look Blockman had given him in the Biltmore Hotel years before. But he remembered nothing, nothing. "'I'll say it again, you god!' Then Blockman struck out. With all the strength in the arm of a well-conditioned man of forty-five, struck out and caught Anthony squarely in the mouth. Anthony cracked up against the staircase, recovered himself, and made a wild, drunken swing at his opponent. But Blockman, who took exercise every day and knew something of sparring, blocked it with ease, and struck him twice in the face with two swift, smashing jabs.  He struggled to his feet, panting and spitting, and then as he started toward Blockman, who stood a few feet away, his fists clenched but not up. Two waiters who had appeared from nowhere seized his arms and held him, helpless. In back of them a dozen people had miraculously gathered. "'I'll kill him,' cried Anthony, pitching and straining from side to side. "'Let me kill—throw him out,' ordered Blockman excitedly, just as a small man with a pock-marked face pushed his way hurriedly through the spectators. "'Any trouble, Mr. Block?' "'This bum tried to blackmail me,' said Blockman, and then, his voice rising to a faintly shrill note of pride, he got what was coming to him. The little man turned to a waiter. "'Call a policeman,' he commanded. "'Oh, no,' said Blockman quickly. "'I can't be bothered. Just throw him out in the street. Ugh! What an outrage!' He turned and with conscious dignity walked toward the washroom, just as six brawny hands seized upon Anthony and dragged him toward the door. The bum was propelled violently to the sidewalk, where he landed on his hands and knees with a grotesque slapping sound, and rolled over slowly onto his side. The shock stunned him. He lay there for a moment in acute distributed pain. Then his discomfort became centralized in his stomach, and he regained consciousness to discover that a large foot was prodding him. "'You've got to move on, you bum. Move on!' It was the bulky doorman speaking. A town-car had stopped at the curb, and its occupants had disembarked. That is, two of the women were standing on the dashboard, waiting in offended delicacy until this obscene obstacle should be removed from their path.  Here I'll get him.' This was a new voice. Anthony imagined that it was somehow more tolerant, better disposed than the first. Again arms were about him, half lifting, half dragging him into a welcome shadow, four doors up the street, and propping him against the stone front of a millinery shop. "'Much obliged,' muttered Anthony, feebly. Someone pushed his soft hat down upon his forehead, and he winced. "'Just sit still, buddy, and you'll feel better. Those guys sure gave you a bump.  He tried to get to his feet, but collapsed backward against the wall. "'You can't do nothing now,' came the voice. Get him some other time. I'm telling you straight. Ain't I? I'm helping you.' Anthony nodded.  You dropped a tooth tonight, buddy. You know that?'  Then, with an effort, he raised his hand and located the gap. "'I'm going to get you home, friend. Whereabouts do you live?' "'Oh, by God, by God,' interrupted Anthony, clenching his fists passionately. "'I'll show the dirty a bunch. You help me show him, and I'll fix it with you. My grandfather's Adam Patch, a tarry-town.' "'Who?' "'Adam Patch, by God. You want to go all the way to tarry-town?' "'No.' "'Well, you tell me where to go, friend, and I'll get a cab.' Anthony made out that his Samaritan was a short, broad-shouldered individual, somewhat the worse for wear. Sodden and shaken as he was, Anthony felt that his address would be poor collateral for his wild boast about his grandfather. "'Give me a cab,' he commanded, feeling in his pockets.  Again, Anthony assayed to rise, but his ankle swung loose as though it were in two sections. The Samaritan must needs help him in, and climb in after him.  And I know you'll make it all right with me. Where do you live?' With some reluctance Anthony gave his address. Then, as the cab moved off, he leaned his head against the man's shoulder and went into a shadowy, painful torpor. When he awoke, the man had lifted him from the cab in front of the apartment on Claremont Avenue, and was trying to set him on his feet. Can you walk?' "'Yes, sort of. You'd better not come in with me.' Again he felt hopelessly in his pockets. Say,' he continued, apologetically, swaying dangerously on his feet. "'I'm afraid I haven't got a cent.' "'Huh?' I'm cleaned out. "'Say, didn't I hear you promise you'd fix it with me? Who's going to pay the taxi bill?' He turned to the driver for confirmation. "'Didn't you hear him say he'd fix it? All that about his grandfather?' "'Matter of fact,' muttered Anthony imprudently. "'It was you, did all the talking. However, if you come round to-morrow,' at this point the taxi driver leaned from his cab and said ferociously, ah, Pokémon, the dirty cheapskate. If he wasn't a bum, they wouldn't have thrown him out.' In answer to this suggestion, the fist of the Samaritan shot out like a battering ram, and sent Anthony crashing down against the stone steps of the apartment house, where he lay without movement while the tall buildings rocked to and fro above him. After a long while he awoke, and was conscious that it had grown much colder. He tried to move himself, but his muscles refused to function. He was curiously anxious to know the time, but he reached for his watch only to find the pocket empty. Involuntarily his lips formed an immemorial phrase. What a night! Strangely enough he was almost sober. Without moving his head he looked up to where the moon was anchored in mid-sky, shedding light down into Claremont Avenue, as into the bottom of a deep and uncharted abyss. There was no sign or sound of life, say for the continuous buzzing in his own ears. But after a moment Anthony himself broke the silence with a distinct and peculiar murmur. It was the sound that he had consistently attempted to make back there in the bull-mitch, when he had been face to face with blockmen. It was an unsteakable sound of ironic laughter, and on his torn and bleeding lips it was like a pitiful retching of the soul. Three weeks later the trial came to an end. The seemingly endless spool of legal red tape, having unrolled over a period of three or four years, suddenly snapped off. Anthony and Gloria, and, on the other side, Edward Shuddleworth, and a platoon of beneficiaries, testified and lied and ill-behaved to generally, in varying degrees of greed and desperation. Anthony awoke one morning in March, realizing that the verdict was to be given at four that afternoon, and at the thought he got up out of his bed and began to dress. With his extreme nervousness there was mingled an unjustified optimism as to the outcome. He believes that the decision of the lower court would be reversed, if only because of the reaction due to excessive prohibition that had recently set in against reforms and reformers. He counted more on the personal attacks that they had leveled at Shuddleworth than on the more sheerly legal aspects of the proceedings. Dressed he poured himself a drink of whiskey and then went into Gloria's room, where he found her already wide awake. She had been in bed for a week, humoring herself, Anthony fancied, though the doctor had said that she had best not be disturbed. Good morning. She murmured without smiling. Her eyes seemed unusually large and dark. How do you feel, he asked grudgingly, better? Yes. Much? Yes. Do you feel well enough to go down to court with me this afternoon? She nodded. Yes, I want to. Dick said yesterday that if the weather was nice he was coming up in his car and take me for a ride in Central Park, and look the room's all full of sunshine. He glanced mechanically out the window and then sat down upon the bed. God, I'm nervous, he exclaimed. Please don't sit there, she said quickly. Why not?  I can't stand it. He got up absentmindedly and left the room.  At two o'clock Richard Caramel's car arrived at the door and when he phoned up Anthony took Gloria down in the elevator and walked with her to the curb. She told her cousin that it was sweet of him to take her riding.  But he did not mean that it was nothing and this was a curious thing. Richard Caramel had forgiven many people for many offences, but he had never forgiven his cousin, Gloria Gilbert, for a statement she had made just prior to her wedding seven years before. She had said that she did not intend to read his book. Richard Caramel remembered this. He had remembered it well for seven years. What time will I expect you back? asked Anthony. We won't come back, she answered, we'll meet you down there at four. All right, he muttered, I'll meet you. Upstairs he found a letter waiting for him. It was a mimeographed notice urging the boys, incondescendingly colloquial language, to pay the dues of the American Legion. He threw it impatiently into the wastebasket and sat down with his elbows on the windowsill, looking down blindly into the sunny street. Italy, if the verdict was in their favour, it meant Italy. The word had become a sort of talisman to him, a land where the intolerable anxieties of life would fall away like an old garment. They would go to the watering-places first, and among the bright and colourful clouds forget the gray appendages of despair. Italy renewed. He would walk again in the Piazza di Spagna, at twilight, moving in that drifting flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars, of austere, barefooted friars. The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly. When his purse hung heavy again, even romance might fly back to perch upon it. The romance of blue canals in Venice, of the golden green hills of fiasol after rain, of women, women who changed, dissolved, melted into other women, and receded from his life, but who were always beautiful and always young. But it seemed to him that there should be a difference in his attitude. All the distress that he had ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had been because of women. It was something that, in different ways they did to him, unconsciously, almost casually, perhaps finding him tender-minded and afraid, they killed the things in him that menaced their absolute sway. Turning about from the window he faced his reflection in the mirror, contemplating dejectedly the wan, pasty face, the eyes with their criss-cross of lines like shreds of dried blood, the stooped and flabby figure whose very sag was a document in lethargy. He was thirty-three. He looked forty. Well, things would be different. The doorbell rang abruptly, and he started as though he had been dealt a blow. Recovering himself, he went into the hall and opened the outer door. It was dot. The encounter. He retreated before her into the living-room, comprehending only a word here and there in the slow flood of sentences that poured from her steadily, one after the other, in a persistent monotone.  He gathered from her words that several days before she had seen an item in the paper concerning the lawsuit, and had obtained his address from the clerk of the appellate division.  In the living-room he stood by the door regarding her with a sort of stupefied horror as she rattled on. His predominant sensation was that all the civilization and convention around him was curiously unreal. She was in a milliner's shop, in Sixth Avenue, she said. It was a lonesome life. She had been sick for a long while after he left for Camp Mills.  She had come to New York with the idea of finding Anthony. She was appallingly in earnest. Her violet eyes were red with tears. Her soft intonation was ragged with little gasping sobs. That was all. She had never changed. She wanted him now, and if she couldn't have him she must die. You'll have to get out, he said at length, speaking with tortuous intensity. Haven't I enough to worry about without you coming here? My God, you'll have to get out. Sobbing, she sat down in a chair. I love you, she cried. I don't care what you say to me. I love you. I don't care, he almost shrieked.  Haven't you done me harm enough? Haven't you done enough? Hit me, she implored him. Wildly, stupidly.  His voice rose until it was pitched almost at a scream.   There was madness in his eyes now, but unintimidated, dot rose and took a step toward him. Anthony, Anthony, he made a little clicking sound with his teeth and drew back as though to spring at her. Then, changing his purpose, he looked wildly about him on the floor and wall. I'll kill you, he was muttering in short, broken gasps.  He seemed to bite at the word as though to force it into materialization. Alarmed at last, she made no further movement forward, but meeting his frantic eyes took a step back toward the door. Anthony began to race here and there on his side of the room, still giving out his single, cursing cry. Then he found what he had been seeking, a stiff, broken chair that stood beside the table. Uttering a harsh, broken shout, he seized it, swung it above his head, and let go with all his raging strength straight at the white, frightened face across the room. Then a thick, impenetrable darkness came down upon him and blotted out thought, rage, and madness together, with almost a tangible snapping sound, the face of the world changed before his eyes. Gloria and Dick came in at five and called his name. There was no answer. They went into the living-room and found a chair with its back smashed, lying in the doorway, and they noticed that all about the room there was a sort of disorder. The rugs had slid, the pictures and brick-a-brack were upset upon the center table. The air was sickly sweet with cheap perfume. They found Anthony, sitting in a patch of sunshine on the floor of his bedroom. Before him, open, were spread his three big stamp-books, and when they entered he was running his hand through a great pile of stamps that he had dumped from the back of one of them. Looking up and seeing Dick and Gloria he put his head critically on one side and motioned them back. "'Anthony,' cried Gloria tensely, "'we've won! They reversed the decision!' "'Don't come in,' he murmured wanly. "'You must them. I'm sorting, and I know you'll step in them.  Going back to childhood, don't you realize you've won the suit? They've reversed the decision of the lower courts. You're worth thirty millions.' Anthony only looked at him reproachfully.  He spoke like a pert child. With a faint horror dawning in her eyes, Gloria gazed at him. "'Anthony,' she cried, "'what is it? What's the matter? Why didn't you come? Why, what is it?' "'See here,' said Anthony softly. You two get out. Now, both of you, or else I'll tell my grandfather.' He held up a handful of stamps and let them come drifting down about him like leaves, varicoloured and bright, turning and fluttering godly upon the sunny air, stamps of England and Ecuador, Venezuela and Spain, Italy, together with the sparrows. That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of so many generations of sparrows, doubtless records the subtlest verbal inflections of the passengers of such ships as the Barangaria, and doubtless it was listening when the young man in the plaid cap crossed the deck quietly and spoke to the pretty girl in yellow. "'That's him,' he said, pointing to a bundled figure seated in a wheelchair near the rail. "'That's Anthony Patch, first time he's been on deck.' "'Oh, that's him?' "'Yes.' "'He's been a little crazy,' they say, ever since he got his money four or five months ago. "'You see, the other fellow, Shuttleworth, the religious fellow, the one that didn't get the money?' He locked himself up in a room in a hotel and shot himself. "'Oh, he did!' "'But I guess Anthony Patch don't care much. He got his thirty million, and he's got his private physician along in case he doesn't feel just right about it.' "'Has she been on deck?' he asked. The pretty girl in yellow looked around cautiously. She was here a minute ago. She had on a Russian sable coat that must have cost a small fortune.' She frowned, and then added decisively. "'I can't stand her, you know. She seems sort of—sort of died and unclean, if you know what I mean. Some people just have that look about them, whether they are or not.' "'Sure, I know,' agreed the man with the plaid cap. "'She's not bad-looking, though.' He paused. "'Wonder what he's thinking about. His money, I guess, or maybe he's got remorse about that fellow Shuddleworth?' "'Probably.' But the man in the plaid cap was quite wrong. Anthony Patch, sitting near the rail and looking out at the sea, was not thinking of his money, for he had seldom in his life been really preoccupied with material vanglory, nor of Edward Shuddleworth. For it is best to look on the sunny side of these things. No, he was concerned with a series of reminiscences, much as a general might look back upon a successful campaign and analyze his victories. He was thinking of the hardships, the insufferable tribulations he had gone through. They had tried to penalize him for the mistakes of his youth. He had been exposed to ruthless misery. His very craving for romance had been punished. His friends had deserted him. Even Gloria had turned against him. He had been alone, alone, facing it all. Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity, to go to work.  Why, the very friends who had been most unkind had come to respect him, to know he had been right all along. Had not the Lacy's and the Meredith's and the Cartwright Smith's called on Gloria and him at the Ritz Carlton just a week before they sailed? Great tears stood in his eyes, and his voice was tremulous as he whispered to himself. I showed them, he was saying. It was a hard fight, but I didn't give up, and I came through. End of Book 3, Chapter 3, Part 2 of 2. End of The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, recorded in Los Angeles, California, August 2008.