Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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She was sitting near the edge, hugging her knees and gazing abstractedly at the white moon; he was farther back, crammed like a grotesque god into a niche in the rock.

“I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna,” she began, “but you haven’t grasped me yet. My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide—not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I’ve been through hell without a whine quite often—and the female hell is deadlier than the male.”

“But supposing,” suggested Carlyle, “that before joy and hope and all that came back the curtain was drawn on you for good?”

Ardita rose, and going to the wall climbed with some difficulty to the next ledge, another ten or fifteen feet above.

“Why,” she called back, “then I’d have won!”

He edged out till he could see her.

“Better not dive from there! You’ll break your back,” he said quickly.

She laughed.

“Not I!”