Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн
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“I shall not go on flattering a world that I have found unkind,” he whispered to the rain. “Instead, I shall go out of this house and out of this town and somewhere find again the happiness that I possessed when I was young.”
Nodding his head, he tore both letters into small fragments and dropped them on the table beside him. For half an hour longer he sat there, rocking a little and smoking his cigar slowly and blowing the blue smoke out into the rain.
II
Down at his office, his chief clerk, Mr. Fowler, approached him with his morning smile.
“Looking fine, Mr. Jackson. Nice day if it hadn’t rained.”
“Yeah,” agreed John Jackson cheerfully. “Clear up in an hour. Anybody outside?”
“A lady named Mrs. Ralston.”
Mr. Fowler raised his grizzled eyebrows in facetious mournfulness.
“Tell her I can’t see her,” said John Jackson, rather to his clerk’s surprise. “And let me have a pencil memorandum of the money I’ve given away through her these twenty years.”
“Why—yes, sir.”
Mr. Fowler had always urged John Jackson to look more closely into his promiscuous charities; but now, after these two decades, it rather alarmed him.