Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Well—you’ve—you’ve had a twenty years’ history.”

“Twenty years—hell—” said Uncle George. “Three years’ history and fifteen years’ aftermath.”

“But your books—and all.”

“Just aftermath, nothing but aftermath. My life stopped at twenty-one one night in October at sixteen minutes after ten. Do you want to hear about it? First I’ll show you the heifer and then I’ll take you upstairs and present you to the altar.”

“I, you—if you—” I demurred feebly, for I was on fire to hear the story.

“Oh,—no trouble. I’ve done the story several times in books and life and around many a littered table. I have no delicacy anymore—I lost that in the first smoke. This is the totally blackened heifer whom you’re talking to now.”

So he told me the story.

“You see it began sophomore year—began most directly and most vividly in Christmas vacation of sophomore year. Before that she’d always gone with a younger crowd—set, you young people call it now,”—he paused and clutched with mental fingers for tangible figures to express himself. “Her dancing, I guess, and beauty and the most direct, unprincipled personality I’ve ever come in contact with. When she wanted a boy there was no preliminary scouting among other girls for information, no sending out of tentative approaches meant to be retailed to him. There was the most direct attack by every faculty and gift that she possessed. She had no divergence of method—she just made you conscious to the highest degree that she was a girl”—he turned his eyes on me suddenly and asked: