Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Look at that!” I exclaimed, passing it over to the twin bed. But the occupant of the twin bed immediately found an article about Leonora Hughes, the dancer, in another column, and began to read it. So of course I demanded the paper back.

“You don’t realize—” I began.

“I wonder,” interrupted the occupant of the twin bed, “if she’s a real blonde.”

However, when I issued from the domestic suite a little later I found other men in various cafés saying “Look at that!” as they pointed to the Item of Interest. And about noon I found another writer (whom I have since bribed with champagne to hold his peace) and together we went down into Franco-American officialdom to see. We discovered that the story began about three days before it got into the papers.

It began on a boat, and with a young woman who, though she wasn’t even faintly uneasy, was leaning over the rail. She was watching the parallels of longitude as they swam beneath the keel, and trying to read the numbers on them, but of course the S. S. Olympic travels too fast for that, and all that the young woman could see was the agate-green, foliage-like spray, changing and complaining around the stern. Though there was little to look at except the spray and a dismal Scandinavian tramp in the distance and the admiring millionaire who was trying to catch her eye from the first-class deck above, Milly Cooley was perfectly happy. For she was beginning life over.