Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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Just as she had about decided that she didn’t love him after all he was ordered abroad, and in a great revival of sentiment she rushed down to the port of embarkation with her mother to bid him good-bye. She wrote him daily for two months, and then weekly for two months, and then once more. This last letter he never got, for a machine-gun bullet ripped through his head one rainy July morning. Perhaps this was just as well, for the letter informed him that it had all been a mistake, and that something told her they would never be happy together, and so on.

The “something” wore boots and silver wings and was tall and dark. Myra was quite sure that it was the real thing at last, but as an engine went through his chest at Kelly Field in mid-August she never had a chance to find out.

Instead she came East again, a little slimmer, with a becoming pallor and new shadows under her eyes, and throughout armistice year she left the ends of cigarettes all over New York on little china trays marked “Midnight Frolic” and “Cocoanut Grove” and “Palais Royal.” She was twenty-one now, and Cleveland people said that her mother ought to take her back home—that New York was spoiling her.