This Side of Paradise
She hesitated.
“I really don’t know what to think about you,” she began, in a
feeble, perverse attempt at conciliation. “You’re so funny.”
“How?”
“Well, I thought you had a lot of self-confidence and all that;
remember you told me the other day that you could do anything you
wanted, or get anything you wanted?”
Amory flushed. He _had_ told her a lot of things.
“Yes.”
“Well, you didn’t seem to feel so self-confident to-night. Maybe
you’re just plain conceited.”
“No, I’m not,” he hesitated. “At Princeton—”
“Oh, you and Princeton! You’d think that was the world, the way
you talk! Perhaps you _can_ write better than anybody else on
your old Princetonian; maybe the freshmen _do_ think you’re
important—”
“You don’t understand—”
“Yes, I do,” she interrupted. “I _do_, because you’re always
talking about yourself and I used to like it; now I don’t.”
“Have I to-night?”
“That’s just the point,” insisted Isabelle. “You got all upset
to-night. You just sat and watched my eyes. Besides, I have to
think all the time I’m talking to you—you’re so critical.”
“I make you think, do I?” Amory repeated with a touch of vanity.
“You’re a nervous strain”—this emphatically—“and when you analyze
every little emotion and instinct I just don’t have ’em.”
“I know.” Amory admitted her point and shook his head helplessly.
“Let’s go.” She stood up.
He rose abstractedly and they walked to the foot of the stairs.
“What train can I get?”
“There’s one about 9:11 if you really must go.”
“Yes, I’ve got to go, really. Good night.”
“Good night.”
They were at the head of the stairs, and as Amory turned into his
room he thought he caught just the faintest cloud of discontent
in her face. He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much
he cared—how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt
vanity—whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for
romance.
When he awoke, it was with a glad flood of consciousness. The
early wind stirred the chintz curtains at the windows and he was
idly puzzled not to be in his room at Princeton with his school
football picture over the bureau and the Triangle Club on the
wall opposite. Then the grandfather’s clock in the hall outside
struck eight, and the memory of the night before came to him. He
was out of bed, dressing, like the wind; he must get out of the
house before he saw Isabelle. What had seemed a melancholy
happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. He was dressed at
half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of
his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an
ironic mockery the morning seemed!—bright and sunny, and full of
the smell of the garden; hearing Mrs. Borge’s voice in the
sun-parlor below, he wondered where was Isabelle.
There was a knock at the door.
“The car will be around at ten minutes of nine, sir.”
He returned to his contemplation of the outdoors, and began
repeating over and over, mechanically, a verse from Browning,
which he had once quoted to Isabelle in a letter:
“Each life unfulfilled, you see, It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;
We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted,
despaired—been happy.”
But his life would not be unfulfilled. He took a sombre
satisfaction in thinking that perhaps all along she had been
nothing except what he had read into her; that this was her high
point, that no one else would ever make her think. Yet that was
what she had objected to in him; and Amory was suddenly tired of
thinking, thinking!
“Damn her!” he said bitterly, “she’s spoiled my year!”
THE SUPERMAN GROWS CARELESS
On a dusty day in September Amory arrived in Princeton and joined
the sweltering crowd of conditioned men who thronged the streets.
It seemed a stupid way to commence his upper-class years, to
spend four hours a morning in the stuffy room of a tutoring
school, imbibing the infinite boredom of conic sections. Mr.
Rooney, pander to the dull, conducted the class and smoked
innumerable Pall Malls as he drew diagrams and worked equations
from six in the morning until midnight.
“Now, Langueduc, if I used that formula, where would my A point
be?”
Langueduc lazily shifts his six-foot-three of football material
and tries to concentrate.
“Oh—ah—I’m damned if I know, Mr. Rooney.”
“Oh, why of course, of course you can’t _use_ that formula.
_That’s_ what I wanted you to say.”
“Why, sure, of course.”
“Do you see why?”
“You bet—I suppose so.”
“If you don’t see, tell me. I’m here to show you.”
“Well, Mr. Rooney, if you don’t mind, I wish you’d go over that
again.”
“Gladly. Now here’s ‘A’...”
The room was a study in stupidity—two huge stands for paper, Mr.
Rooney in his shirt-sleeves in front of them, and slouched around
on chairs, a dozen men: Fred Sloane, the pitcher, who absolutely
_had_ to get eligible; “Slim” Langueduc, who would beat Yale this
fall, if only he could master a poor fifty per cent; McDowell,
gay young sophomore, who thought it was quite a sporting thing to
be tutoring here with all these prominent athletes.
“Those poor birds who haven’t a cent to tutor, and have to study
during the term are the ones I pity,” he announced to Amory one
day, with a flaccid camaraderie in the droop of the cigarette
from his pale lips. “I should think it would be such a bore,
there’s so much else to do in New York during the term. I suppose
they don’t know what they miss, anyhow.” There was such an air of
“you and I” about Mr. McDowell that Amory very nearly pushed him
out of the open window when he said this. ... Next February his
mother would wonder why he didn’t make a club and increase his
allowance... simple little nut....
Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that
filled the room would come the inevitable helpless cry:
“I don’t get it! Repeat that, Mr. Rooney!” Most of them were so
stupid or careless that they wouldn’t admit when they didn’t
understand, and Amory was of the latter. He found it impossible
to study conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing
respectability breathing defiantly through Mr. Rooney’s fetid
parlors distorted their equations into insoluble anagrams. He
made a last night’s effort with the proverbial wet towel, and
then blissfully took the exam, wondering unhappily why all the
color and ambition of the spring before had faded out. Somehow,
with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate success
had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a
possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even
though it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the
Princetonian board and the slaughter of his chances for the
Senior Council.
There was always his luck.
He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered
from the room.
“If you don’t pass it,” said the newly arrived Alec as they sat
on the window-seat of Amory’s room and mused upon a scheme of
wall decoration, “you’re the world’s worst goopher. Your stock
will go down like an elevator at the club and on the campus.”
“Oh, hell, I know it. Why rub it in?”
“’Cause you deserve it. Anybody that’d risk what you were in line
for _ought_ to be ineligible for Princetonian chairman.”
“Oh, drop the subject,” Amory protested. “Watch and wait and shut
up. I don’t want every one at the club asking me about it, as if
I were a prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show.” One
evening a week later Amory stopped below his own window on the
way to Renwick’s, and, seeing a light, called up:
“Oh, Tom, any mail?”
Alec’s head appeared against the yellow square of light.
“Yes, your result’s here.”
His heart clamored violently.
“What is it, blue or pink?”
“Don’t know. Better come up.”
He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then
suddenly noticed that there were other people in the room.
“’Lo, Kerry.” He was most polite. “Ah, men of Princeton.” They
seemed to be mostly friends, so he picked up the envelope marked
“Registrar’s Office,” and weighed it nervously.
“We have here quite a slip of paper.”
“Open it, Amory.”
“Just to be dramatic, I’ll let you know that if it’s blue, my
name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my
short career is over.”
He paused, and then saw for the first time Ferrenby’s eyes,
wearing a hungry look and watching him eagerly. Amory returned
the gaze pointedly.
“Watch my face, gentlemen, for the primitive emotions.”
He tore it open and held the slip up to the light.
“Well?”
“Pink or blue?”
“Say what it is.”
“We’re all ears, Amory.”
“Smile or swear—or something.”
There was a pause... a small crowd of seconds swept by... then he
looked again and another crowd went on into time.
“Blue as the sky, gentlemen....”
AFTERMATH
What Amory did that year from early September to late in the
spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems
scarcely worth recording. He was, of course, immediately sorry
for what he had lost. His philosophy of success had tumbled down
upon him, and he looked for the reasons.
“Your own laziness,” said Alec later.
“No—something deeper than that. I’ve begun to feel that I was
meant to lose this chance.”
“They’re rather off you at the club, you know; every man that
doesn’t come through makes our crowd just so much weaker.”
“I hate that point of view.”
“Of course, with a little effort you could still stage a
comeback.”
“No—I’m through—as far as ever being a power in college is
concerned.”
“But, Amory, honestly, what makes me the angriest isn’t the fact
that you won’t be chairman of the Prince and on the Senior
Council, but just that you didn’t get down and pass that exam.”
“Not me,” said Amory slowly; “I’m mad at the concrete thing. My
own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck
broke.”
“Your system broke, you mean.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, what are you going to do? Get a better one quick, or just
bum around for two more years as a has-been?”
“I don’t know yet...”
“Oh, Amory, buck up!”
“Maybe.”
Amory’s point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the
true one. If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated,
the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his
earliest years:
1. The fundamental Amory.
2. Amory plus Beatrice.
3. Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis.
Then St. Regis’ had pulled him to pieces and started him over
again:
4. Amory plus St. Regis’.
5. Amory plus St. Regis’ plus Princeton.
That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity.