Flappers and Philosophers | Page 9

blue and silver they threaded
the shimmering channel in the rowboat and, tying it to a jutting rock,
began climbing the cliff together. The first shelf was ten feet up, wide,
and furnishing a natural diving platform. There they sat down in the
bright moonlight and watched the faint incessant surge of the waters
almost stilled now as the tide set seaward.
"Are you happy?" he asked suddenly.
She nodded.
"Always happy near the sea. You know," she went on, "I've been
thinking all day that you and I are somewhat alike. We're both
rebels--only for different reasons. Two years ago, when I was just
eighteen and you were---"
"Twenty-five."

"---well, we were both conventional successes. I was an utterly
devastating débutante and you were a prosperous musician just
commissioned in the army---"
"Gentleman by act of Congress," he put in ironically.
"Well, at any rate, we both fitted. If our corners were not rubbed off
they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that
made us require more for happiness. I didn't know what I wanted. I
went from man to man, restless, impatient, month by month getting less
acquiescent and more dissatisfied. I used to sit sometimes chewing at
the insides of my mouth and thinking I was going crazy--I had a
frightful sense of transiency. I wanted things now--now--now! Here I
was--beautiful--I am, aren't I?"
"Yes," agreed Carlyle tentatively.
Ardita rose suddenly.
"Wait a second. I want to try this delightful-looking sea."
She walked to the end of the ledge and shot out over the sea, doubling
up in mid-air and then straightening out and entering to water straight
as a blade in a perfect jack-knife dive.
In a minute her voice floated up to him.
"You see, I used to read all day and most of the night. I began to resent
society---"
"Come on up here," he interrupted. "What on earth are you doing?"
"Just floating round on my back. I'll be up in a minute. Let me tell you.
The only thing I enjoyed was shocking people; wearing something
quite impossible and quite charming to a fancy-dress party, going
round with the fastest men in New York, and getting into some of the
most hellish scrapes imaginable."
The sounds of splashing mingled with her words, and then he heard her

hurried breathing as she began climbing up side to the ledge.
"Go on in!" she called
Obediently he rose and dived. When he emerged, dripping, and made
the climb he found that she was no longer on the ledge, but after a
frightened he heard her light laughter from another shelf ten feet up.
There he joined her and they both sat quietly for a moment, their arms
clasped round their knees, panting a little from the climb.
"The family were wild," she said suddenly. "They tried to marry me off.
And then when I'd begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth
living I found something"--her eyes went skyward exultantly---"I found
something!"
Carlyle waited and her words came with a rush.
"Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to
always. I began to build up this enormous faith in myself. I began to
see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had
unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. I began separating
courage from the other things of life. All sorts of courage--the beaten,
bloody prize-fighter coming up for more--I used to make men take me
to prize-fights; the déclassé woman sailing through a nest of cats and
looking at them as if they were mud under her feet; the liking what you
like always; the utter disregard for other people's opinions--just to live
as I liked always and to die in my own way-- Did you bring up the
cigarettes?"
He handed one over and held a match for her gently.
"Still," Ardita continued, "the men kept gathering--old men and young
men, my mental and physical inferiors, most of them, but all intensely
desiring to have me--to own this rather magnificent proud tradition I'd
built up round me. Do you see?"
"Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized."

"Never!"
She sprang to the edge, poised for a moment like a crucified figure
against the sky; then describing a dark parabola plunked without a slash
between two silver ripples twenty feet below.
Her voice floated up to him again.
"And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that
comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but
overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of
life and the worth of transient things."
She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the
damp