Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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The second day he visited twelve houses. He might have kept on his round for a week and never seen the same butler twice but it was only the palatial, the amazing houses which intrigued him.

On the third day he did a thing that many people have been told to do and few have done—he hired a hall. Exactly one week later he sent a wire to Miss Amanthis Powell saying that if she still aspired to the gaiety of the highest society she should set out for Southampton by the earliest possible train. He himself would meet her at the station.

Jim Powell was no longer a man of leisure, so when she failed to arrive at the time her wire had promised he grew restless. He supposed she was coming on a later train, turned to go back to his project—and met her entering the station from the street side.

“Why, how did you——”

“Well,” said Amanthis, “I arrived this morning instead, and I didn’t want to bother you so I found a respectable boarding house on the Ocean Road.”

She was quite different from the indolent Amanthis of the porch hammock, he thought. She wore a suit of robin’s-egg blue and a rakish young hat with a curling feather—she was attired not unlike those young ladies between sixteen and twenty who of late were absorbing his attention. Yes, she would do very well.