This Side of Paradise
that its part was timidly negligible, and they haven’t any good
writers any more. I’m sick of Chesterton.
I’ve only discovered one soldier who passed through the
much-advertised spiritual crisis, like this fellow, Donald
Hankey, and the one I knew was already studying for the ministry,
so he was ripe for it. I honestly think that’s all pretty much
rot, though it seemed to give sentimental comfort to those at
home; and may make fathers and mothers appreciate their children.
This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at
best. I think four men have discovered Paris to one that
discovered God.
But us—you and me and Alec—oh, we’ll get a Jap butler and dress
for dinner and have wine on the table and lead a contemplative,
emotionless life until we decide to use machine-guns with the
property owners—or throw bombs with the Bolshevik God! Tom, I
hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a
horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.
The place at Lake Geneva is now for rent but when I land I’m
going West to see Mr. Barton and get some details. Write me care
of the Blackstone, Chicago.
S’ever, dear Boswell,
SAMUEL JOHNSON.
BOOK TWO—The Education of a Personage
CHAPTER 1. The Debutante
The time is February. The place is a large, dainty bedroom in the
Connage house on Sixty-eighth Street, New York. A girl’s room:
pink walls and curtains and a pink bedspread on a cream-colored
bed. Pink and cream are the motifs of the room, but the only
article of furniture in full view is a luxurious dressing-table
with a glass top and a three-sided mirror. On the walls there is
an expensive print of “Cherry Ripe,” a few polite dogs by
Landseer, and the “King of the Black Isles,” by Maxfield Parrish.
Great disorder consisting of the following items: (1) seven or
eight empty cardboard boxes, with tissue-paper tongues hanging
panting from their mouths; (2) an assortment of street dresses
mingled with their sisters of the evening, all upon the table,
all evidently new; (3) a roll of tulle, which has lost its
dignity and wound itself tortuously around everything in sight,
and (4) upon the two small chairs, a collection of lingerie that
beggars description. One would enjoy seeing the bill called forth
by the finery displayed and one is possessed by a desire to see
the princess for whose benefit—Look! There’s some one!
Disappointment! This is only a maid hunting for something—she
lifts a heap from a chair—Not there; another heap, the
dressing-table, the chiffonier drawers. She brings to light
several beautiful chemises and an amazing pajama but this does
not satisfy her—she goes out.
An indistinguishable mumble from the next room.
Now, we are getting warm. This is Alec’s mother, Mrs. Connage,
ample, dignified, rouged to the dowager point and quite worn out.
Her lips move significantly as she looks for IT. Her search is
less thorough than the maid’s but there is a touch of fury in it,
that quite makes up for its sketchiness. She stumbles on the
tulle and her “damn” is quite audible. She retires, empty-handed.
More chatter outside and a girl’s voice, a very spoiled voice,
says: “Of all the stupid people—”
After a pause a third seeker enters, not she of the spoiled
voice, but a younger edition. This is Cecelia Connage, sixteen,
pretty, shrewd, and constitutionally good-humored. She is dressed
for the evening in a gown the obvious simplicity of which
probably bores her. She goes to the nearest pile, selects a small
pink garment and holds it up appraisingly.
CECELIA: Pink?
ROSALIND: (Outside) Yes!
CECELIA: _Very_ snappy?
ROSALIND: Yes!
CECELIA: I’ve got it!
(She sees herself in the mirror of the dressing-table and
commences to shimmy enthusiastically.)
ROSALIND: (Outside) What are you doing—trying it on?
(CECELIA ceases and goes out carrying the garment at the right
shoulder.
From the other door, enters ALEC CONNAGE. He looks around quickly
and in a huge voice shouts: Mama! There is a chorus of protest
from next door and encouraged he starts toward it, but is
repelled by another chorus.)
ALEC: So _that’s_ where you all are! Amory Blaine is here.
CECELIA: (Quickly) Take him down-stairs.
ALEC: Oh, he _is_ down-stairs.
MRS. CONNAGE: Well, you can show him where his room is. Tell him
I’m sorry that I can’t meet him now.
ALEC: He’s heard a lot about you all. I wish you’d hurry.
Father’s telling him all about the war and he’s restless. He’s
sort of temperamental.
(This last suffices to draw CECELIA into the room.)
CECELIA: (Seating herself high upon lingerie) How do you
mean—temperamental? You used to say that about him in letters.
ALEC: Oh, he writes stuff.
CECELIA: Does he play the piano?
ALEC: Don’t think so.
CECELIA: (Speculatively) Drink?
ALEC: Yes—nothing queer about him.
CECELIA: Money?
ALEC: Good Lord—ask him, he used to have a lot, and he’s got some
income now.
(MRS. CONNAGE appears.)
MRS. CONNAGE: Alec, of course we’re glad to have any friend of
yours—
ALEC: You certainly ought to meet Amory.
MRS. CONNAGE: Of course, I want to. But I think it’s so childish
of you to leave a perfectly good home to go and live with two
other boys in some impossible apartment. I hope it isn’t in order
that you can all drink as much as you want. (She pauses.) He’ll
be a little neglected to-night. This is Rosalind’s week, you see.
When a girl comes out, she needs _all_ the attention.
ROSALIND: (Outside) Well, then, prove it by coming here and
hooking me.
(MRS. CONNAGE goes.)
ALEC: Rosalind hasn’t changed a bit.
CECELIA: (In a lower tone) She’s awfully spoiled.
ALEC: She’ll meet her match to-night.
CECELIA: Who—Mr. Amory Blaine?
(ALEC nods.)
CECELIA: Well, Rosalind has still to meet the man she can’t
outdistance. Honestly, Alec, she treats men terribly. She abuses
them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their
faces—and they come back for more.
ALEC: They love it.
CECELIA: They hate it. She’s a—she’s a sort of vampire, I
think—and she can make girls do what she wants usually—only she
hates girls.
ALEC: Personality runs in our family.
CECELIA: (Resignedly) I guess it ran out before it got to me.
ALEC: Does Rosalind behave herself?
CECELIA: Not particularly well. Oh, she’s average—smokes
sometimes, drinks punch, frequently kissed—Oh, yes—common
knowledge—one of the effects of the war, you know.
(Emerges MRS. CONNAGE.)
MRS. CONNAGE: Rosalind’s almost finished so I can go down and
meet your friend.
(ALEC and his mother go out.)
ROSALIND: (Outside) Oh, mother—
CECELIA: Mother’s gone down.
(And now ROSALIND enters. ROSALIND is—utterly ROSALIND. She is
one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to
have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull
men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are
usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural
prerogative.
If ROSALIND could be spoiled the process would have been complete
by this time, and as a matter of fact, her disposition is not all
it should be; she wants what she wants when she wants it and she
is prone to make every one around her pretty miserable when she
doesn’t get it—but in the true sense she is not spoiled. Her
fresh enthusiasm, her will to grow and learn, her endless faith
in the inexhaustibility of romance, her courage and fundamental
honesty—these things are not spoiled.
There are long periods when she cordially loathes her whole
family. She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem
for herself and laissez faire for others. She loves shocking
stories: she has that coarse streak that usually goes with
natures that are both fine and big. She wants people to like her,
but if they do not it never worries her or changes her. She is by
no means a model character.
The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men.
ROSALIND had been disappointed in man after man as individuals,
but she had great faith in man as a sex. Women she detested. They
represented qualities that she felt and despised in
herself—incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty
dishonesty. She once told a roomful of her mother’s friends that
the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing
element among men. She danced exceptionally well, drew cleverly
but hastily, and had a startling facility with words, which she
used only in love-letters.
But all criticism of ROSALIND ends in her beauty. There was that
shade of glorious yellow hair, the desire to imitate which
supports the dye industry. There was the eternal kissable mouth,
small, slightly sensual, and utterly disturbing. There were gray
eyes and an unimpeachable skin with two spots of vanishing color.
She was slender and athletic, without underdevelopment, and it
was a delight to watch her move about a room, walk along a
street, swing a golf club, or turn a “cartwheel.”
A last qualification—her vivid, instant personality escaped that
conscious, theatrical quality that AMORY had found in ISABELLE.
MONSIGNOR DARCY would have been quite up a tree whether to call
her a personality or a personage. She was perhaps the delicious,
inexpressible, once-in-a-century blend.
On the night of her debut she is, for all her strange, stray
wisdom, quite like a happy little girl. Her mother’s maid has
just done her hair, but she has decided impatiently that she can
do a better job herself. She is too nervous just now to stay in
one place. To that we owe her presence in this littered room. She
is going to speak. ISABELLE’S alto tones had been like a violin,
but if you could hear ROSALIND, you would say her voice was
musical as a waterfall.)
ROSALIND: Honestly, there are only two costumes in the world that
I really enjoy being in—(Combing her hair at the dressing-table.)
One’s a hoop skirt with pantaloons; the other’s a one-piece
bathing-suit. I’m quite charming in both of them.
CECELIA: Glad you’re coming out?
ROSALIND: Yes; aren’t you?
CECELIA: (Cynically) You’re glad so you can get married and live
on Long Island with the _fast younger married set_. You want life
to be a chain of flirtation with a man for every link.
ROSALIND: _Want_ it to be one! You mean I’ve _found_ it one.
CECELIA: Ha!
ROSALIND: Cecelia, darling, you don’t know what a trial it is to
be—like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to
keep men from winking at me. If I laugh hard from a front row in
the theatre, the comedian plays to me for the rest of the