Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

1021 страница из 1457

“Miss Caruthers,” she would sneer crisply, “what’s the idea of no jam? Do you wanta whack the side of the head?”

“Diana! I’m going to call your mother this minute!”

“Look at here!” threatened Diana darkly. “If you call her you’re liable to get a bullet the side of the head.”

Miss Caruthers raised her hand uneasily to her bangs. She was somewhat awed.

“Very well,” she said uncertainly, “if you want to act like a little ragamuffin——”

Diana did want to. The evolutions which she practiced daily on the sidewalk and which were thought by the neighbors to be some new form of hop-scotch were in reality the preliminary work on an Apache slouch. When it was perfected, Diana lurched forth into the streets of Greenwich, her face violently distorted and half-obliterated by her father’s slouch hat, her body reeling from side to side, jerked hither and yon by the shoulders, until to look at her long was to feel a faint dizziness rising to the brain.

At first it was merely absurd, but when Diana’s conversation commenced to glow with weird rococo phrases, which she imagined to be the dialect of the underworld, it became alarming. And a few years later she further complicated the problem by turning into a beauty—a dark little beauty with tragedy eyes and a rich voice stirring in her throat.