The Beautiful and Damned
about myself--don't you?"
"Invariably!" agreed the two men in unison.
"Well, tell me."
"I'm not sure that I ought to," teased Anthony, smiling unwillingly. She
was so obviously interested, in a state of almost laughable
self-absorption.
"He means your nickname," said her cousin.
"What name?" inquired Anthony, politely puzzled.
Instantly she was shy--then she laughed, rolled back against the
cushions, and turned her eyes up as she spoke:
"Coast-to-Coast Gloria." Her voice was full of laughter, laughter
undefined as the varying shadows playing between fire and lamp upon her
hair. "O Lord!"
Still Anthony was puzzled.
"What do you mean?"
"_Me_, I mean. That's what some silly boys coined for _me_."
"Don't you see, Anthony," explained Dick, "traveller of a nation-wide
notoriety and all that. Isn't that what you've heard? She's been called
that for years--since she was seventeen."
Anthony's eyes became sad and humorous.
"Who's this female Methuselah you've brought in here, Caramel?"
She disregarded this, possibly rather resented it, for she switched back
to the main topic.
"What _have_ you heard of me?"
"Something about your physique."
"Oh," she said, coolly disappointed, "that all?"
"Your tan."
"My tan?" She was puzzled. Her hand rose to her throat, rested there an
instant as though the fingers were feeling variants of color.
"Do you remember Maury Noble? Man you met about a month ago. You made a
great impression."
She thought a moment.
"I remember--but he didn't call me up."
"He was afraid to, I don't doubt."
It was black dark without now and Anthony wondered that his apartment
had ever seemed gray--so warm and friendly were the books and pictures
on the walls and the good Bounds offering tea from a respectful shadow
and the three nice people giving out waves of interest and laughter back
and forth across the happy fire.
DISSATISFACTION
On Thursday afternoon Gloria and Anthony had tea together in the grill
room at the Plaza. Her fur-trimmed suit was gray--"because with gray you
_have_ to wear a lot of paint," she explained--and a small toque sat
rakishly on her head, allowing yellow ripples of hair to wave out in
jaunty glory. In the higher light it seemed to Anthony that her
personality was infinitely softer--she seemed so young, scarcely
eighteen; her form under the tight sheath, known then as a hobble-skirt,
was amazingly supple and slender, and her hands, neither "artistic" nor
stubby, were small as a child's hands should be.
As they entered, the orchestra were sounding the preliminary whimpers to
a maxixe, a tune full of castanets and facile faintly languorous violin
harmonies, appropriate to the crowded winter grill teeming with an
excited college crowd, high-spirited at the approach of the holidays.
Carefully, Gloria considered several locations, and rather to Anthony's
annoyance paraded him circuitously to a table for two at the far side of
the room. Reaching it she again considered. Would she sit on the right
or on the left? Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made
her choice, and Anthony thought again how naïve was her every gesture;
she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion,
as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an
inexhaustible counter.
Abstractedly she watched the dancers for a few moments, commenting
murmurously as a couple eddied near.
"There's a pretty girl in blue"--and as Anthony looked obediently--"
there! No. behind you--there!"
"Yes," he agreed helplessly.
"You didn't see her."
"I'd rather look at you."
"I know, but she was pretty. Except that she had big ankles."
"Was she?--I mean, did she?" he said indifferently.
A girl's salutation came from a couple dancing close to them.
"Hello, Gloria! O Gloria!"
"Hello there."
"Who's that?" he demanded.
"I don't know. Somebody." She caught sight of another face. "Hello,
Muriel!" Then to Anthony: "There's Muriel Kane. Now I think she's
attractive, 'cept not very."
Anthony chuckled appreciatively.
"Attractive, 'cept not very," he repeated.
She smiled--was interested immediately.
"Why is that funny?" Her tone was pathetically intent.
"It just was."
"Do you want to dance?"
"Do you?"
"Sort of. But let's sit," she decided.
"And talk about you? You love to talk about you, don't you?"
"Yes." Caught in a vanity, she laughed.
"I imagine your autobiography would be a classic."
"Dick says I haven't got one."
"Dick!" he exclaimed. "What does he know about you?"
"Nothing. But he says the biography of every woman begins with the first
kiss that counts, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms."
"He's talking from his book."
"He says unloved women have no biographies--they have histories."
Anthony laughed again.
"Surely you don't claim to be unloved!"
"Well, I suppose not."
"Then why haven't you a biography? Haven't you ever had a kiss that
counted?" As the words left his lips he drew in his breath sharply as
though to suck them back. This _baby_!
"I don't know what you mean 'counts,'" she objected.
"I wish you'd tell me how old you are."
"Twenty-two," she said, meeting his eyes gravely. "How old did you
think?"
"About eighteen."
"I'm going to start being that. I don't like being twenty-two. I hate it
more than anything in the world."
"Being twenty-two?"
"No. Getting old and everything. Getting married."
"Don't you ever want to marry?"
"I don't want to have responsibility and a lot of children to take care
of."
Evidently she did not doubt that on her lips all things were good. He
waited rather breathlessly for her next remark, expecting it to follow
up her last. She was smiling, without amusement but pleasantly, and
after an interval half a dozen words fell into the space between them:
"I wish I had some gum-drops."
"You shall!" He beckoned to a waiter and sent him to the cigar counter.
"D'you mind? I love gum-drops. Everybody kids me about it because I'm
always whacking away at one--whenever my daddy's not around."
"Not at all.--Who are all these children?" he asked suddenly. "Do you
know them all?"
"Why--no, but they're from--oh, from everywhere, I suppose. Don't you
ever come here?"
"Very seldom. I don't care particularly for 'nice girls.'"
Immediately he had her attention. She turned a definite shoulder to the
dancers, relaxed in her chair, and demanded:
"What _do_ you do with yourself?"
Thanks to a cocktail Anthony welcomed the question. In a mood to talk,
he wanted, moreover, to impress this girl whose interest seemed so
tantalizingly elusive--she stopped to browse in unexpected pastures,
hurried quickly over the inobviously obvious. He wanted to pose. He
wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted
to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything
except herself.
"I do nothing," he began, realizing simultaneously that his words were
to lack the debonair grace he craved for them. "I do nothing, for
there's nothing I can do that's worth doing."
"Well?" He had neither surprised her nor even held her, yet she had
certainly understood him, if indeed he had said aught worth
understanding.
"Don't you approve of lazy men?"
She nodded.
"I suppose so, if they're gracefully lazy. Is that possible for an
American?"
"Why not?" he demanded, discomfited.
But her mind had left the subject and wandered up ten floors.
"My daddy's mad at me," she observed dispassionately.
"Why? But I want to know just why it's impossible for an American to be
gracefully idle"--his words gathered conviction--"it astonishes me.
It--it--I don't understand why people think that every young man ought
to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of
his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work."
He broke off. She watched him inscrutably. He waited for her to agree or
disagree, but she did neither.
"Don't you ever form judgments on things?" he asked with some
exasperation.
She shook her head and her eyes wandered back to the dancers as she
answered:
"I don't know. I don't know anything about--what you should do, or what
anybody should do."
She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had
never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.
"Well," he admitted apologetically, "neither do I, of course, but--"
"I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where
they are and fit into the picture. I don't mind if they don't do
anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me
when anybody does anything."
"You don't want to do anything?"
"I want to sleep."
For a second he was startled, almost as though she had meant this
literally.
"Sleep?"
"Sort of. I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me
to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe--and
I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be
graceful and companionable for me. But I never want to change people or
get excited over them."
"You're a quaint little determinist," laughed Anthony. "It's your world,
isn't it?"
"Well--" she said with a quick upward glance, "isn't it? As long as
I'm--young."
She had paused slightly before the last word and Anthony suspected that
she had started to say "beautiful." It was undeniably what she
had intended.
Her eyes brightened and he waited for her to enlarge on the theme. He
had drawn her out, at any rate--he bent forward slightly to catch
the words.
But "Let's dance!" was all she said.
ADMIRATION
That winter afternoon at the Plaza was the first of a succession of
"dates" Anthony made with her in the blurred and stimulating days before
Christmas. Invariably she was busy. What particular strata of the city's
social life claimed her he was a long time finding out. It seemed to
matter very little. She attended the semi-public charity dances at the
big hotels; he saw her several times at dinner parties in Sherry's, and
once as he waited for her to dress, Mrs. Gilbert, apropos of her
daughter's habit of "going," rattled off an amazing holiday programme
that included half a dozen dances to which Anthony had received cards.
He made engagements with her several times for lunch and tea--the former
were hurried and, to him at least, rather unsatisfactory occasions, for
she was sleepy-eyed and casual, incapable of concentrating upon anything
or of giving consecutive attention to his remarks. When after two of
these sallow meals he accused her of tendering him the skin and bones of
the day she laughed and gave him a tea-time three days off. This was
infinitely more satisfactory.
One Sunday afternoon just before Christmas he called up and found her in
the lull directly after some important but mysterious quarrel: she
informed him in a tone of mingled wrath and amusement that she had sent
a man out of her apartment--here Anthony speculated violently--and that
the man had been giving a little dinner for her that very night and that
of course she wasn't going. So Anthony took her to supper.
"Let's go to something!" she proposed as they went down in the elevator.
"I want to see a show, don't you?"
Inquiry at the hotel ticket desk disclosed only two Sunday night
"concerts."
"They're always the same," she complained unhappily, "same old Yiddish
comedians. Oh, let's go somewhere!"
To conceal a guilty suspicion that he should have arranged a performance
of some kind for her approval Anthony affected a knowing cheerfulness.
"We'll go to a good cabaret."
"I've seen every one in town."
"Well, we'll find a new one."