Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Anyway,” he continued, “I haven’t the vital urge. I wanted to be a regular human being but the girl couldn’t see it that way.”

“You’ll find another.”

“God! Banish the thought. Why don’t you tell me that ‘if the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you’? No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody. If I thought there’d be another I’d lose my remaining faith in human nature. Maybe I’ll play—but Rosalind was the only girl in the wide world that could have held me.”

“Well,” yawned Tom, “I’ve played confidant a good hour by the clock. Still, I’m glad to see you’re beginning to have violent views again on something.”

“I am,” agreed Amory reluctantly. “Yet when I see a happy family it makes me sick at my stomach——”

“Happy families try to make people feel that way,” said Tom cynically.

There were days when Amory listened. These were when Tom, wreathed in smoke, indulged in the slaughter of American literature. Words failed him.

“Fifty thousand dollars a year,” he would cry. “My God! Look at them, look at them—Edna Ferber, Gouveneer Morris, Fanny Hurst, Mary Roberts Rinehart—not producing among ’em one story or novel that will last ten years. This man Cobb—I don’t think he’s either clever or amusing—and what’s more, I don’t think very many people do, except the editors. He’s just groggy with advertising. And—oh Harold Bell Wright oh Zane Grey——”