Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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Amory: Come over here and kiss me.

Rosalind: No.

Amory: Don’t you want to kiss me?

Rosalind: To-night I want you to love me calmly and coolly.

Amory: The beginning of the end.

Rosalind: (With a burst of insight) Amory, you’re young. I’m young. People excuse us now for our poses and vanities, for treating people like Sancho and yet getting away with it. They excuse us now. But you’ve got a lot of knocks coming to you——

Amory: And you’re afraid to take them with me.

Rosalind: No, not that. There was a poem I read somewhere—you’ll say Ella Wheeler Wilcox and laugh—but listen:

“For this is wisdom—to love and live,

To take what fate or the gods may give,

To ask no question, to make no prayer,

To kiss the lips and caress the hair,

Speed passion’s ebb as we greet its flow,

To have and to hold, and, in time—let go.”

Amory: But we haven’t had.

Rosalind: Amory, I’m yours—you know it. There have been times in the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so. But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives.