Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“But you better be thinking how you’re going to amuse yourself.”

He looked at her helplessly.

“All I can think of doing is maybe take to drink,” he confessed. “I come from a little town, and when they say leisure they mean hanging round the corner store.” He shook his head. “I don’t want any leisure. This is the first chance I ever had, and I want to make good.”

“Listen, Rip,” said Lola on a sudden impulse. “After you finish up at the office this afternoon you meet me and we’ll fix up something together.”

He met her, as she suggested, at five o’clock, but the melancholy had deepened in his dark eyes.

“They wouldn’t let me in,” he said. “I met your father in there, and he told me I had to find some way to amuse myself or I’d be just a bored old man like him.”

“Never mind. We’ll go to a show,” she said consolingly; “and after that we’ll run up on some roof and dance.”

It was the first of a week of evenings they spent together. Sometimes they went to the theatre, sometimes to a cabaret; once they spent most of an afternoon strolling in Central Park. But she saw that from having been the most light-hearted and gay of the three young men, he was now the most moody and depressed. Everything whispered to him of the work he was missing.