Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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John—(Bitterly) I remember.

Helen—Then, John, here’s the worst of it. There’s a point where everything changes.

John—(Mournfully interested) What do you mean?

Helen—Well, sometimes it’s a kiss and sometimes it’s long before anything like that. Now if it’s a kiss, it can do one of three things.

John—Three! It’s done a thousand to me.

Helen—It can make him get tired of you, but a clever girl can avoid this. It’s only the young ones and the heroines of magazine epigrams that are kissed and deserted. Then there’s the second possibility. It can make you tired of him. This is usual. He immediately thinks of nothing but being alone with the girl, and she, rather touchy about the whole thing, gets snappy, and he’s first lovesick, then discouraged, and finally lost.

John—(More grimly) Go on.

Helen—Then the third state is where the kiss really means something, where the girl lets go of herself and the man is in deadly earnest.

John—Then they’re engaged?

Helen—Exactly.

John—Weren’t we?

Helen—(Emphatically) No, we distinctly were not. I knew what I was doing every blessed second, John Cannel.