This Side of Paradise
However, in the last month, when her winter visit to Sally had
been decided on, he had assumed the proportions of a worthy
adversary. Children, most astute of match-makers, plot their
campaigns quickly, and Sally had played a clever correspondence
sonata to Isabelle’s excitable temperament. Isabelle had been for
some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions....
They drew up at a spreading, white-stone building, set back from
the snowy street. Mrs. Weatherby greeted her warmly and her
various younger cousins were produced from the corners where they
skulked politely. Isabelle met them tactfully. At her best she
allied all with whom she came in contact—except older girls and
some women. All the impressions she made were conscious. The
half-dozen girls she renewed acquaintance with that morning were
all rather impressed and as much by her direct personality as by
her reputation. Amory Blaine was an open subject. Evidently a bit
light of love, neither popular nor unpopular—every girl there
seemed to have had an affair with him at some time or other, but
no one volunteered any really useful information. He was going to
fall for her.... Sally had published that information to her
young set and they were retailing it back to Sally as fast as
they set eyes on Isabelle. Isabelle resolved secretly that she
would, if necessary, _force_ herself to like him—she owed it to
Sally. Suppose she were terribly disappointed. Sally had painted
him in such glowing colors—he was good-looking, “sort of
distinguished, when he wants to be,” had a line, and was properly
inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age
and environment led her to desire. She wondered if those were his
dancing-shoes that fox-trotted tentatively around the soft rug
below.
All impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely
kaleidoscopic to Isabelle. She had that curious mixture of the
social and the artistic temperaments found often in two classes,
society women and actresses. Her education or, rather, her
sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled
on her favor; her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for
love-affairs was limited only by the number of the susceptible
within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large
black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical
magnetism.
So she waited at the head of the stairs that evening while
slippers were fetched. Just as she was growing impatient, Sally
came out of the dressing-room, beaming with her accustomed good
nature and high spirits, and together they descended to the floor
below, while the shifting search-light of Isabelle’s mind flashed
on two ideas: she was glad she had high color to-night, and she
wondered if he danced well.
Down-stairs, in the club’s great room, she was surrounded for a
moment by the girls she had met in the afternoon, then she heard
Sally’s voice repeating a cycle of names, and found herself
bowing to a sextet of black and white, terribly stiff, vaguely
familiar figures. The name Blaine figured somewhere, but at first
she could not place him. A very confused, very juvenile moment of
awkward backings and bumpings followed, and every one found
himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabelle
manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with
whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A
humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things
Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable. First,
she repeated it rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto with a
soupcon of Southern accent; then she held it off at a distance
and smiled at it—her wonderful smile; then she delivered it in
variations and played a sort of mental catch with it, all this in
the nominal form of dialogue. Froggy was fascinated and quite
unconscious that this was being done, not for him, but for the
green eyes that glistened under the shining carefully watered
hair, a little to her left, for Isabelle had discovered Amory. As
an actress even in the fullest flush of her own conscious
magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the
front row, so Isabelle sized up her antagonist. First, he had
auburn hair, and from her feeling of disappointment she knew that
she had expected him to be dark and of garter-advertisement
slenderness.... For the rest, a faint flush and a straight,
romantic profile; the effect set off by a close-fitting dress
suit and a silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women still
delight to see men wear, but men were just beginning to get tired
of.
During this inspection Amory was quietly watching.
“Don’t _you_ think so?” she said suddenly, turning to him,
innocent-eyed.
There was a stir, and Sally led the way over to their table.
Amory struggled to Isabelle’s side, and whispered:
“You’re my dinner partner, you know. We’re all coached for each
other.”
Isabelle gasped—this was rather right in line. But really she
felt as if a good speech had been taken from the star and given
to a minor character.... She mustn’t lose the leadership a bit.
The dinner-table glittered with laughter at the confusion of
getting places and then curious eyes were turned on her, sitting
near the head. She was enjoying this immensely, and Froggy Parker
was so engrossed with the added sparkle of her rising color that
he forgot to pull out Sally’s chair, and fell into a dim
confusion. Amory was on the other side, full of confidence and
vanity, gazing at her in open admiration. He began directly, and
so did Froggy:
“I’ve heard a lot about you since you wore braids—”
“Wasn’t it funny this afternoon—”
Both stopped. Isabelle turned to Amory shyly. Her face was always
enough answer for any one, but she decided to speak.
“How—from whom?”
“From everybody—for all the years since you’ve been away.” She
blushed appropriately. On her right Froggy was _hors de combat_
already, although he hadn’t quite realized it.
“I’ll tell you what I remembered about you all these years,”
Amory continued. She leaned slightly toward him and looked
modestly at the celery before her. Froggy sighed—he knew Amory,
and the situations that Amory seemed born to handle. He turned to
Sally and asked her if she was going away to school next year.
Amory opened with grape-shot.
“I’ve got an adjective that just fits you.” This was one of his
favorite starts—he seldom had a word in mind, but it was a
curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something
complimentary if he got in a tight corner.
“Oh—what?” Isabelle’s face was a study in enraptured curiosity.
Amory shook his head.
“I don’t know you very well yet.”
“Will you tell me—afterward?” she half whispered.
He nodded.
“We’ll sit out.”
Isabelle nodded.
“Did any one ever tell you, you have keen eyes?” she said.
Amory attempted to make them look even keener. He fancied, but he
was not sure, that her foot had just touched his under the table.
But it might possibly have been only the table leg. It was so
hard to tell. Still it thrilled him. He wondered quickly if there
would be any difficulty in securing the little den up-stairs.
BABES IN THE WOODS
Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they
particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little
value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably
be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he
had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest
was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room
conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had
walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her
eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was
proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop
off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear
it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of
blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had
slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose—it was
one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He
was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because
she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best
game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity
before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite
guile that would have horrified her parents.
After the dinner the dance began... smoothly. Smoothly?—boys cut
in on Isabelle every few feet and then squabbled in the corners
with: “You might let me get more than an inch!” and “She didn’t
like it either—she told me so next time I cut in.” It was
true—she told every one so, and gave every hand a parting
pressure that said: “You know that your dances are _making_ my
evening.”
But time passed, two hours of it, and the less subtle beaux had
better learned to focus their pseudo-passionate glances
elsewhere, for eleven o’clock found Isabelle and Amory sitting on
the couch in the little den off the reading-room up-stairs. She
was conscious that they were a handsome pair, and seemed to
belong distinctively in this seclusion, while lesser lights
fluttered and chattered down-stairs.
Boys who passed the door looked in enviously—girls who passed
only laughed and frowned and grew wise within themselves.
They had now reached a very definite stage. They had traded
accounts of their progress since they had met last, and she had
listened to much she had heard before. He was a sophomore, was on
the Princetonian board, hoped to be chairman in senior year. He
learned that some of the boys she went with in Baltimore were
“terrible speeds” and came to dances in states of artificial
stimulation; most of them were twenty or so, and drove alluring
red Stutzes. A good half seemed to have already flunked out of
various schools and colleges, but some of them bore athletic
names that made him look at her admiringly. As a matter of fact,
Isabelle’s closer acquaintance with the universities was just
commencing. She had bowing acquaintance with a lot of young men
who thought she was a “pretty kid—worth keeping an eye on.” But
Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gayety that would
have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young
contralto voices on sink-down sofas.
He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was
a difference between conceit and self-confidence. She adored
self-confidence in men.
“Is Froggy a good friend of yours?” she asked.
“Rather—why?”
“He’s a bum dancer.”
Amory laughed.
“He dances as if the girl were on his back instead of in his
arms.”
She appreciated this.