Then they were off for half an hour on literature.
“A classic,” suggested Anthony, “is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it’s safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It’s acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion. …”
After a time the subject temporarily lost its tang. The interest of the two young men was not particularly technical. They were in love with generalities. Anthony had recently discovered Samuel Butler and the brisk aphorisms in the notebook seemed to him the quintessence of criticism. Maury, his whole mind so thoroughly mellowed by the very hardness of his scheme of life, seemed inevitably the wiser of the two, yet in the actual stuff of their intelligences they were not, it seemed, fundamentally different.
They drifted from letters to the curiosities of each other’s day.
“Whose tea was it?”
“People named Abercrombie.”
“Why’d you stay late? Meet a luscious débutante?”
“Yes.”
“Did you really?” Anthony’s voice lifted in surprise.
“Not a débutante exactly. Said she came out two winters ago in Kansas City.”
“Sort of leftover?”
“No,” answered Maury with some amusement, “I think that’s the last thing I’d say about her. She seemed—well, somehow the youngest person there.”
“Not too young to make you miss a train.”
“Young enough. Beautiful child.”
Anthony chuckled in his one-syllable snort.
“Oh, Maury, you’re in your second childhood. What do you mean by beautiful?”
Maury gazed helplessly into space.
“Well, I can’t describe her exactly—except to say that she was beautiful. She was—tremendously alive. She was eating gumdrops.”
“What!”
“It was a sort of attenuated vice. She’s a nervous kind—said she always ate gumdrops at teas because she had to stand around so long in one place.”
“What’d you talk about—Bergson? Bilphism? Whether the one-step is immoral?”
Maury was unruffled; his fur seemed to run all ways.
“As a matter of fact we did talk on Bilphism. Seems her mother’s a Bilphist. Mostly, though, we talked about legs.”
Anthony rocked in glee.
“My God! Whose legs?”
“Hers. She talked a lot about hers. As though they were a sort of choice bric-a-brac. She aroused a great desire to see them.”
“What is she—a dancer?”
“No, I found she was a cousin of Dick’s.”
Anthony sat upright so suddenly that the pillow he released stood on end like a live thing and dove to the floor.
“Name’s Gloria Gilbert?” he cried.
“Yes. Isn’t she remarkable?”
“I’m sure I don’t know—but for sheer dullness her father—”
“Well,” interrupted Maury with implacable conviction, “her family may be as sad as professional mourners but I’m inclined to think that she’s a quite authentic and original character. The outer signs of the cut-and-dried Yale prom girl and all that—but different, very emphatically different.”
“Go on, go on!” urged Anthony. “Soon as Dick told me she didn’t have a brain in her head I knew she must be pretty good.”
“Did he say that?”
“Swore to it,” said Anthony with another snorting laugh.
“Well, what he means by brains in a woman is—”
“I know,” interrupted Anthony eagerly, “he means a smattering of literary misinformation.”
“That’s it. The kind who believes that the annual moral letdown of the country is a very good thing or the kind who believes it’s a very ominous thing. Either pince-nez or postures. Well, this girl talked about legs. She talked about skin too—her own skin. Always her own. She told me the sort of tan she’d like to get in the summer and how closely she usually approximated it.”
“You sat enraptured by her low alto?”
“By her low alto! No, by tan! I began thinking about tan. I began to think what color I turned when I made my last exposure about two years ago. I did use to get a pretty good tan. I used to get a sort of bronze, if I remember rightly.”
Anthony retired into the cushions, shaken with laughter.
“She’s got you going—oh, Maury! Maury the Connecticut lifesaver. The human nutmeg. Extra! Heiress elopes with coastguard because of his luscious pigmentation! Afterward found to be Tasmanian strain in his family!”
Maury sighed; rising he walked to the window and raised the shade.
“Snowing hard.”
Anthony, still laughing quietly to himself, made no answer.
“Another winter.” Maury’s voice from the window was almost a whisper. “We’re growing old, Anthony. I’m twenty-seven, by God! Three years to thirty, and then I’m what an undergraduate calls a middle-aged man.”
Anthony was silent for a moment.
“You are old, Maury,” he agreed at length. “The first signs of a very dissolute and wabbly senescence—you have spent the afternoon talking about tan and a lady’s legs.”
Maury pulled down the shade with a sudden harsh snap.
“Idiot!” he cried, “that from you! Here I sit, young Anthony, as I’ll sit for a generation or more and watch such gay souls as you and Dick and Gloria Gilbert go past me, dancing and singing and loving and hating one another and being moved, being eternally moved. And I am moved only by my lack of emotion. I shall sit and the snow will come—oh, for a Caramel to take notes—and another winter and I shall be thirty and you and Dick and Gloria will go on being eternally moved and dancing by me and singing. But after you’ve all gone I’ll be saying things for new Dicks to write down, and listening to the disillusions and cynicisms and emotions of new Anthonys—yes, and talking to new Glorias about the tans of summers yet to come.”
The firelight flurried up on the hearth. Maury left
