Then at the New Year Miss Vienna Thorne came home from Madrid and in February a man named Case brought her down to the Senior Prom.
IV
She was even prettier than she had been before, softer, externally at least, and a tremendous success. People passing her on the street jerked their heads quickly to look at her—a frightened look, as if they realized that they had almost missed something. She was temporarily tired of European men, she told me, letting me gather that there had been some sort of unfortunate love affair. She was coming out in Washington next fall.
Vienna and Dolly. She disappeared with him for two hours the night of the club dances, and Harold Case was in despair. When they walked in again at midnight I thought they were the handsomest pair I saw. They were both shining with that peculiar luminosity that dark people sometimes have. Harold Case took one look at them and went proudly home.
Vienna came back a week later, solely to see Dolly. Late that evening I had occasion to go up to the deserted club for a book and they called me from the rear terrace, which opens out to the ghostly stadium and to an unpeopled sweep of night. It was an hour of thaw, with spring voices in the warm wind, and wherever there was light enough you could see drops glistening and falling. You could feel the cold melting out of the stars and the bare trees and shrubbery toward Stony Brook turning lush in the darkness.
They were sitting together on a wicker bench, full of themselves and romantic and happy.
“We had to tell someone about it,” they said.
“Now can I go?”
“No, Jeff,” they insisted; “stay here and envy us. We’re in the stage where we want someone to envy us. Do you think we’re a good match?”
What could I say?
“Dolly’s going to finish at Princeton next year,” Vienna went on, “but we’re going to announce it after the season in Washington in the autumn.”
I was vaguely relieved to find that it was going to be a long engagement.
“I approve of you, Jeff,” Vienna said.
“I want Dolly to have more friends like you. You’re stimulating for him—you have ideas. I told Dolly he could probably find others like you if he looked around his class.”
Dolly and I both felt a little uncomfortable.
“She doesn’t want me to be a Babbitt,” he said lightly.
“Dolly’s perfect,” asserted Vienna. “He’s the most beautiful thing that ever lived, and you’ll find I’m very good for him, Jeff. Already I’ve helped him make up his mind about one important thing.” I guessed what was coming. “He’s going to speak a little piece if they bother him about playing football next autumn, aren’t you, child?”
“Oh, they won’t bother me,” said Dolly uncomfortably. “It isn’t like that—”
“Well, they’ll try to bully you into it, morally.”
“Oh, no,” he objected. “It isn’t like that. Don’t let’s talk about it now, Vienna. It’s such a swell night.”
Such a swell night! When I think of my own love passages at Princeton, I always summon up that night of Dolly’s, as if it had been I and not he who sat there with youth and hope and beauty in his arms.
Dolly’s mother took a place on Ram’s Point, Long Island, for the summer, and late in August I went East to visit him. Vienna had been there a week when I arrived, and my impressions were: first, that he was very much in love; and, second, that it was Vienna’s party. All sorts of curious people used to drop in to see Vienna. I wouldn’t mind them now—I’m more sophisticated—but then they seemed rather a blot on the summer. They were all slightly famous in one way or another, and it was up to you to find out how. There was a lot of talk, and especially there was much discussion of Vienna’s personality. Whenever I was alone with any of the other guests we discussed Vienna’s sparkling personality. They thought I was dull, and most of them thought Dolly was dull. He was better in his line than any of them were in theirs, but his was the only specialty that wasn’t mentioned. Still, I felt vaguely that I was being improved and I boasted about knowing most of those people in the ensuing year, and was annoyed when people failed to recognize their names.
The day before I left, Dolly turned his ankle playing tennis, and afterward he joked about it to me rather somberly.
“If I’d only broken it things would be so much easier. Just a quarter of an inch more bend and one of the bones would have snapped. By the way, look here.”
He tossed me a letter. It was a request that he report at Princeton for practice on September fifteenth and that meanwhile he begin getting himself in good condition.
“You’re not going to play this fall?”
He shook his head.
“No. I’m not a child any more. I’ve played for two years and I want this year free. If I went through it again it’d be a piece of moral cowardice.”
“I’m not arguing, but—would you have taken this stand if it hadn’t been for Vienna?”
“Of course I would. If I let myself be bullied into it I’d never be able to look myself in the face again.”
Two weeks later I got the following letter:
Dear Jeff:
When you read this you’ll be somewhat surprised. I have, actually, this time, broken my ankle playing tennis. I can’t even walk with crutches at present; it’s on a chair in front of me swollen up and wrapped up as big as a house as
