Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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They glanced shoreward at the line of mysterious and alluring lights, the big toy banks with candles inside that were really the great fashionable hotels, the lighted clock in the old town, the blurred glow of the Café de Paris, the pricked-out points of villa windows rising on slow hills toward the dark sky.

“What is everyone doing there?” she whispered. “It looks as though something gorgeous was going on, but what it is I can’t quite tell.”

“Everyone there is making love,” said Val quietly.

“Is that it?” She looked for a long time, with a strange expression in her eyes. “Then I want to go home to America,” she said. “There is too much love here. I want to go home tomorrow.”

“You are afraid of being in love then?”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t that. It’s just because—there is no love here for me.”

“Or for me either,” added Val quietly. “It is sad that we two should be at such a lovely place on such a lovely night and have—nothing.”

He was leaning toward her intently, with a sort of inspired and chaste romance in his eyes—and she drew back.