Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Very well, I’ll phone you.”

“Do—about ten.”

“Try to be able to—then or any time.”

“I’ll tell you—if I can’t go to dinner with you Wednesday I can go to lunch surely.”

“All right,” he agreed. “And we’ll go to a matinée.”

They danced several times. Never by word or sign did Yanci betray more than the most cursory interest in him until just at the end, when she offered him her hand to say good-bye.

“Good-bye, Scott.”

For just the fraction of a second—not long enough for him to be sure it had happened at all, but just enough so that he would be reminded, however faintly, of that night on the Mississippi boulevard—she looked into his eyes. Then she turned quickly and hurried away.

She took her dinner in a little tea room around the corner. It was an economical dinner which cost a dollar and a half. There was no date concerned in it at all, and no man except an elderly person in spats who tried to speak to her as she came out the door.

Sitting alone in one of the magnificent moving-picture theatres—a luxury which she thought she could afford—Yanci watched Mae Murray swirl through splendidly imagined vistas, and meanwhile considered the progress of the first day. In retrospect it was a distinct success. She had given the correct impression both as to her material prosperity and as to her attitude toward Scott himself. It seemed best to avoid evening dates. Let him have the evenings to himself, to think of her, to imagine her with other men, even to spend a few lonely hours in his apartment, considering how much more cheerful it might be if—— Let time and absence work for her.