Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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When the disbanding came, Amory set out posthaste for Minneapolis, for Sally Weatherby’s cousin, Isabelle Borgé, was coming to spend the winter in Minneapolis while her parents went abroad. He remembered Isabelle only as a little girl with whom he had played sometimes when he first went to Minneapolis. She had gone to Baltimore to live—but since then she had developed a past.

Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant. Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without compunction he wired his mother not to expect him … sat in the train, and thought about himself for thirty-six hours.

On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with that great current American phenomenon, the “petting party.”

None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed. “Servant-girls are that way,” says Mrs. Huston-Carmelite to her popular daughter. “They are kissed first and proposed to afterward.”