Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Do about it?” he asked. “Oh—that spot; it’ll disappear in a second.”

“It isn’t,” she said, after a moment of concentrated gazing, “it’s still there—and it looks like Old Nick—oh, Amory, what’ll we do! It’s just the height of your shoulder.”

“Massage it,” he suggested, repressing the faintest inclination to laugh.

She rubbed it delicately with the tips of her fingers, and then a tear gathered in the corner of her eye, and slid down her cheek.

“Oh, Amory,” she said despairingly, lifting up a most pathetic face, “I’ll just make my whole neck flame if I rub it. What’ll I do?”

A quotation sailed into his head and he couldn’t resist repeating it aloud.

“All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this little hand.”

She looked up and the sparkle of the tear in her eye was like ice.

“You’re not very sympathetic.”

Amory mistook her meaning.

“Isabelle, darling, I think it’ll——”

“Don’t touch me!” she cried. “Haven’t I enough on my mind and you stand there and laugh!”

Then he slipped again.

“Well, it is funny, Isabelle, and we were talking the other day about a sense of humor being——”