Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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So Fifth Avenue and the top of the buses had really grown to stand for a lot. They meant relief from the painted, pagan crowds of Broadway, the crowded atmosphere of the blue serge suits and grated windows that he met downtown and the dingy middle-class cloud that hovered on his boarding house. Fifth Avenue had a certain respectability which he would have once despised; the people on the buses looked better fed, their mouths came together in better lines. Always a symbolist, and an idealist, whether his model had been a profligate but magnetic sophomore or a Carlylized Napoleon, he sought around him in his common life for something to cling to, to stand for what religions and families and philosophies of life had stood for. He had a certain sense of fitness which convinced him that his old epicureanism, romantic as it might have been in the youth of his year at college, would have been exotic and rather disgusting in the city itself. It was much too easy; it lacked the penance of the five o’clock morning train back to college that had faced himself and his fellow student revelers; it lacked the penance of the long morning in classes and the poverty of weeks. It had been something to have, a reputation, even such a reputation as this crowd had had, but dissipation from the New York standpoint seemed a matter of spats and disgustingly rich Hebrews, and shoddy Bohemianism had no attraction for him.