This Side of Paradise | Page 3

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THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
By F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There's little comfort in the wise. Rupert Brooke.
Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes. Oscar
Wilde.

To SIGOURNEY FAY

CONTENTS
BOOK ONE: The Romantic Egotist 1. AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE
2. SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 3. THE EGOTIST CONSIDERS 4.
NARCISSUS OFF DUTY
[INTERLUDE: MAY, 1917-FEBRUARY, 1919.]
BOOK TWO: The Education of a Personage 1. THE DIBUTANTE 2.
EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 3. YOUNG IRONY 4. THE
SUPERCILIOUS SACRIFICE 5. THE EGOTIST BECOMES A
PERSONAGE

BOOK ONE The Romantic Egotist
CHAPTER 1
Amory, Son of Beatrice
AMORY BLAINE inherited from his mother every trait, except the
stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an
ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of
drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty
through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers,
and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar
Harbor and met Beatrice O'Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine
handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his
tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing
in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his
family's life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by
lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in "taking care" of his wife,
continually harassed by the idea that he didn't and couldn't understand
her.

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her
father's estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred
Heart Convent-an educational extravagance that in her youth was only
for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy-showed the exquisite
delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her
clothes. A brilliant education she had her -youth passed in renaissance
glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families;
known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal
Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must
have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to
prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in
two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O'Hara
absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again;
a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be
contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and
traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great
gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.
In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen
Blaine and married him-this almost entirely because she was a little bit
weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome
season and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six.
When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her.
He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he
would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for
fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with
his mother in her father's private car, from Coronado, where his mother
became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable
hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic
consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as
an intrinsic part of her atmosphere-especially after several astounding
bracers.
So, while more or