Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Poor taxi man,” she was saying half aloud. “Oh, people have such a hard time—such a hard time!”

She rapped on the window and when the car drew up at a curb she got out. She was at the end of Fifth Avenue and it was dark and cold.

“Send for the police!” she cried in a quick low voice. “I haven’t any money!”

The taxi man scowled down at her.

“Then what’d you get in for?”

She had not noticed that another car had stopped about twenty-five feet behind them. She heard running footsteps in the snow and then a voice at her elbow.

“It’s all right,” someone was saying to the taxi man. “I’ve got it right here.”

A bill was passed up. Yanci slumped sideways against Scott’s overcoat.

Scott knew—he knew because he had gone to Princeton to surprise her, because the stranger she had spoken to in the Ritz had been his best friend, because the check of her father’s for three hundred dollars had been returned to him marked “No funds.” Scott knew—he had known for days.

But he said nothing; only stood there holding her with one arm as her taxi drove away.