Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Do you know a girl named Elaine Russel?”

“Yes, Miss Dickey. She comes here quite often.”

“I wonder if you can tell me where she lives.”

The head-waiter considered.

“Find out,” she said sharply. “I’m in a hurry.”

He bowed. Diana had come here many times with many men. She had never asked him a favor before.

His eyes roved hurriedly around the room.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I’m all right. You hurry.”

He crossed the room and whispered to a man at a table—in a minute he was back with the address, an apartment on 49th Street.

In her car again she looked at her wrist watch—it was almost midnight, the appropriate hour. A feeling of romance, of desperate and dangerous adventure thrilled her, seemed to flow out of the electric signs and the rushing cabs and the high stars. Perhaps she was only one out of a hundred people bound on such an adventure tonight—for her there had been nothing like this since the war.

Skidding the corner into East 49th Street she scanned the apartments on both sides. There it was—“The Elkson”—a wide mouth of forbidding yellow light. In the hall a negro elevator boy asked her name.