This Side of Paradise | Page 8

Myra's voice was placid as a summer lake
when she answered her mother.
"Oh, we started so late, mama, that I thought we might as well" He
heard from below the shrieks of laughter, and smelled the vapid odor of
hot chocolate and tea-cakes as he silently followed mother and
daughter down-stairs. The sound of the graphophone mingled with the
voices of many girls humming the air, and a faint glow was born and
spread over him:
"Casey-Jonesmounted to the cab-un Casey-Jones'th his orders in his
hand. Casey-Jonesmounted to the cab-un Took his farewell journey to
the prom-ised land."
SNAPSHOTS OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST
Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he wore
moccasins that were born yellow, but after many applications of oil and
dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish brown; he wore a gray
plaid mackinaw coat, and a red toboggan cap. His dog, Count Del
Monte, ate the red cap, so his uncle gave him a gray one that pulled
down over his face. The trouble with this one was that you breathed
into it and your breath froze; one day the darn thing froze his cheek. He
rubbed snow on his cheek, but it turned bluish-black just the same.
The Count Del Monte ate a box of bluing once, but it didn't hurt him.
Later, however, he lost his mind and ran madly up the street, bumping
into fences, rolling in gutters, and pursuing his eccentric course out of
Amory's life. Amory cried on his bed. "Poor little Count," he cried. "Oh,
poor little Count!" After several months he suspected Count of a fine
piece of emotional acting.
Amory and Frog Parker considered that the greatest line in literature
occurred in Act III of "Arsene Lupin."
They sat in the first row at the Wednesday and Saturday matinies. The
line was:

"If one can't be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to
be a great criminal."
Amory fell in love again, and wrote a poem. This was it:
"Marylyn and Sallee, Those are the girls for me. Marylyn stands above
Sallee in that sweet, deep love."
He was interested in whether McGovern of Minnesota would make the
first or second All-American, how to do the card-pass, how to do the
coin-pass, chameleon ties, how babies were born, and whether
Three-fingered Brown was really a better pitcher than Christie
Mathewson.
Among other things he read: "For the Honor of the School," "Little
Women" (twice), "The Common Law," "Sapho," "Dangerous Dan
McGrew," "The Broad Highway" (three times), "The Fall of the House
of Usher," "Three Weeks," "Mary Ware, the Little Colonel's Chum,"
"Gunga Din," The Police Gazette, and Jim-Jam Jems. He had all the
Henty biasses in history, and was particularly fond of the cheerful
murder stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart. School ruined his French and
gave him a distaste for standard authors. His masters considered him
idle, unreliable and superficially clever.
He collected locks of hair from many girls. He wore the rings of several.
Finally he could borrow no more rings, owing to his nervous habit of
chewing them out of shape. This, it seemed, usually aroused the jealous
suspicions of the next borrower. All through the summer months
Amory and Frog Parker went each week to the Stock Company.
Afterward they would stroll home in the balmy air of August night,
dreaming along Hennepin and Nicollet Avenues, through the gay
crowd. Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a
boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him
and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of
expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of
fourteen. Always, after he was in bed, there were voicesindefinite,
fading, enchantingjust outside his window, and before he fell asleep he
would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one about

becoming a great half-back, or the one about the Japanese invasion,
when he was rewarded by being made the youngest general in the
world. It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.
CODE OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST
Before he was summoned back to Lake Geneva, he had appeared, shy
but inwardly glowing, in his first long trousers, set off by a purple
accordion tie and a "Belmont" collar with the edges unassailably
meeting, purple socks, and handkerchief with a purple border peeping
from his breast pocket. But more than that, he had formulated his first
philosophy, a code to live by, which, as near as it can be named, was a
sort of aristocratic egotism. He had realized that his best interests were
bound up with those of a certain variant, changing person,