Francis Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned

“… Think you’ve got the best name I’ve heard,” she was saying, still apparently to herself; her glance rested on him a moment and then flitted past him—to the Italian bracket-lamps clinging like luminous yellow turtles at intervals along the walls, to the books row upon row, then to her cousin on the other side. “Anthony Patch. Only you ought to look sort of like a horse, with a long narrow face—and you ought to be in tatters.”

“That’s all the Patch part, though. How should Anthony look?”

“You look like Anthony,” she assured him seriously—he thought she had scarcely seen him—“rather majestic,” she continued, “and solemn.”

Anthony indulged in a disconcerted smile.

“Only I like alliterative names,” she went on, “all except mine. Mine’s too flamboyant. I used to know two girls named Jinks, though, and just think if they’d been named anything except what they were named—Judy Jinks and Jerry Jinks. Cute, what? Don’t you think?” Her childish mouth was parted, awaiting a rejoinder.

“Everybody in the next generation,” suggested Dick, “will be named Peter or Barbara—because at present all the piquant literary characters are named Peter or Barbara.”

Anthony continued the prophecy:

“Of course Gladys and Eleanor, having graced the last generation of heroines and being at present in their social prime, will be passed on to the next generation of shop-girls—”

“Displacing Ella and Stella,” interrupted Dick.

“And Pearl and Jewel,” Gloria added cordially, “and Earl and Elmer and Minnie.”

“And then I’ll come along,” remarked Dick, “and picking up the obsolete name, Jewel, I’ll attach it to some quaint and attractive character and it’ll start its career all over again.”

Her voice took up the thread of subject and wove along with faintly upturning, half-humorous intonations for sentence ends—as though defying interruption—and intervals of shadowy laughter. Dick had told her that Anthony’s man was named Bounds—she thought that was wonderful! Dick had made some sad pun about Bounds doing patchwork, but if there was one thing worse than a pun, she said, it was a person who, as the inevitable come-back to a pun, gave the perpetrator a mock-reproachful look.

“Where are you from?” inquired Anthony. He knew, but beauty had rendered him thoughtless.

“Kansas City, Missouri.”

“They put her out the same time they barred cigarettes.”

“Did they bar cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather.”

“He’s a reformer or something, isn’t he?”

“I blush for him.”

“So do I,” she confessed. “I detest reformers, especially the sort who try to reform me.”

“Are there many of those?”

“Dozens. It’s ‘Oh, Gloria, if you smoke so many cigarettes you’ll lose your pretty complexion!’ and ‘Oh, Gloria, why don’t you marry and settle down?’”

Anthony agreed emphatically while he wondered who had had the temerity to speak thus to such a personage.

“And then,” she continued, “there are all the subtle reformers who tell you the wild stories they’ve heard about you and how they’ve been sticking up for you.”

He saw, at length, that her eyes were gray, very level and cool, and when they rested on him he understood what Maury had meant by saying she was very young and very old. She talked always about herself as a very charming child might talk, and her comments on her tastes and distastes were unaffected and spontaneous.

“I must confess,” said Anthony gravely, “that even I ’ve heard one thing about you.”

Alert at once, she sat up straight. Those eyes, with the grayness and eternity of a cliff of soft granite, caught his.

“Tell me. I’ll believe it. I always believe anything any one tells me 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.

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.”