The Beautiful and the Damned | Page 3

of reading in bed--it soothed him. He read until
he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on.
His favorite diversion until he was fourteen was his stamp collection;
enormous, as nearly exhaustive as a boy's could be--his grandfather

considered fatuously that it was teaching him geography. So Anthony
kept up a correspondence with a half dozen "Stamp and Coin"
companies and it was rare that the mail failed to bring him new
stamp-books or packages of glittering approval sheets--there was a
mysterious fascination in transferring his acquisitions interminably
from one book to another. His stamps were his greatest happiness and
he bestowed impatient frowns on any one who interrupted him at play
with them; they devoured his allowance every month, and he lay awake
at night musing untiringly on their variety and many-colored splendor.
At sixteen he had lived almost entirely within himself, an inarticulate
boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely bewildered by his
contemporaries. The two preceding years had been spent in Europe
with a private tutor, who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing; it
would "open doors," it would be a tremendous tonic, it would give him
innumerable self-sacrificing and devoted friends. So he went to
Harvard--there was no other logical thing to be done with him.
Oblivious to the social system, he lived for a while alone and unsought
in a high room in Beck Hall--a slim dark boy of medium height with a
shy sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the
foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile
first editions of Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, and a yellowed
illegible autograph letter of Keats's, finding later that he had been
amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy, amassed a
rather pathetic collection of silk pajamas, brocaded dressing-gowns,
and neckties too flamboyant to wear; in this secret finery he would
parade before a mirror in his room or lie stretched in satin along his
window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor,
breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have a
part.
Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a
position in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather
romantic figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused
him but secretly pleased him--he began going out, at first a little and
then a great deal. He made the Pudding. He drank--quietly and in the

proper tradition. It was said of him that had he not come to college so
young he might have "done extremely well." In 1909, when he
graduated, he was only twenty years old.
Then abroad again--to Rome this time, where he dallied with
architecture and painting in turn, took up the violin, and wrote some
ghastly Italian sonnets, supposedly the ruminations of a
thirteenth-century monk on the joys of the contemplative life. It
became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome,
and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and
discovered with him, on many moonlight excursions, much in the city
that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the republic. Maury
Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and
together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a
delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was
very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his grandfather's called
on him, and had he so desired he might have been persona grata with
the diplomatic set--indeed, he found that his inclinations tended more
and more toward conviviality, but that long adolescent aloofness and
consequent shyness still dictated to his conduct.
He returned to America in 1912 because of one of his grandfather's
sudden illnesses, and after an excessively tiresome talk with the
perpetually convalescent old man he decided to put off until his
grandfather's death the idea of living permanently abroad. After a
prolonged search he took an apartment on Fifty-second Street and to all
appearances settled down.
In 1913 Anthony Patch's adjustment of himself to the universe was in
process of consummation. Physically, he had improved since his
undergraduate days--he was still too thin but his shoulders had widened
and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year.
He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span--his friends
declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled. His nose was too
sharp; his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined
to droop perceptibly in moments of unhappiness, but his blue eyes were
charming, whether alert with intelligence or half closed in an

expression of melancholy humor.
One of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature essential to the
Aryan ideal,