Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“You go on in,” urged Marion nervously. “I’d rather wait out here.”

“Please come in.”

“Why? He’ll be in bed and he doesn’t want any women around.”

“But he’d like to see you—it’d cheer him up. And he’d know that we understood about tonight. He sounded awfully depressed over the phone.”

He urged her from the cab.

“Let’s only stay a minute,” she whispered tensely as they went up in the elevator. “The show starts at half-past eight.”

“Apartment on the right,” said the elevator man.

They rang the bell and waited. The door opened and they walked directly into Charley Hart’s great studio room.

It was crowded with people; from end to end ran a long lamp-lit dinner table strewn with ferns and young roses, from which a gay murmur of laughter and conversation arose into the faintly smoky air. Twenty women in evening dress sat on one side in a row chatting across the flowers at twenty men, with an elation born of the sparkling burgundy which dripped from many bottles into thin chilled glass. Up on the high narrow balcony which encircled the room a string quartet was playing something by Stravinski in a key that was pitched just below the women’s voices and filled the air like an audible wine.