Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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He sat at dinner and thought himself rather stupid and unnecessarily moody as his sister’s light chatter amused the table. Lord and Lady Blachford, himself and two unsullied aunts. In the first place he was rather doubtful about his sister’s new manner. She seemed, well, perhaps a bit loud and theatrical; and she was certainly pretty enough not to need so much paint. She couldn’t be more than eighteen, and paint—it seemed so useless. Of course he was used to it in his mother, would have been shocked had she appeared in her unrouged furrowedness, but on Clara it merely accentuated her youth. Altogether he had never seen such obvious paint, and, as they had always been a shockingly frank family, he told her so.

“You’ve got too much stuff on your face.” He tried to speak casually and his sister, nothing wroth, jumped up and ran to a mirror.

“No, I haven’t,” she said, calmly returning.

“I thought,” he continued, rather annoyed, “that the criterion of how much paint to put on was whether men were sure you’d used any or not.”