Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“They try to be. All the old man does is tell me he just met the most wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic friend of his and then he says: ‘There‘s a character for you! Why don’t you write him up? Everybody’d be interested in him.’ Or else he tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and says: ‘Why don’t you write a story about that place? That’d be a wonderful setting for a story!’”

“How about the girl?” inquired Anthony casually, “Gloria—Gloria what?”

“Gilbert. Oh, you’ve heard of her—Gloria Gilbert. Goes to dances at colleges—all that sort of thing.”

“I’ve heard her name.”

“Good-looking—in fact damned attractive.”

They reached Fiftieth Street and turned over toward the Avenue.

“I don’t care for young girls as a rule,” said Anthony, frowning.

This was not strictly true. While it seemed to him that the average debutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any girl who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him enormously.