#fuckyeahfitzgerald

Yes—because I couldn’t ever marry you. You’ve a place in my heart no one else ever could have, but tied down here I’d get restless. I’d feel I was—wastin’ myself. There’s two sides to me, you see. There’s the sleepy old side you love an’ there’s a sort of energy—the feeling that makes me do wild things. That’s the part of me that may be useful somewhere, that’ll last when I’m not beautiful any more.

‘You see,’ said Carlyle softly, 'this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding—it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.’

No matter how beautiful or brilliant a girl may be, the reputation of not being frequently cut in on makes her position at a dance unfortunate. Perhaps boys prefer her company to that of the butterflies with whom they dance a dozen times an evening, but youth in this jazz-nourished generation is temperamentally restless, and the idea of fox-trotting more than one full fox trot with the same girl is distasteful, not to say odious. When it comes to several dances and the intermissions between she can be quite sure that a young man, once relieved, will never tread on her wayward toes again.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

Abe North was talking to her about his moral code: ‘Of course I’ve got one,’ he insisted. ‘— a man can’t live without a moral code. Mine is that I’m against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.’

Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape— that world was cold and full of bleak wind, and for a little while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone.

It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in the light of the moon.

To these two life had come quickly and gone, leaving not bitterness, but pity; not disillusion, but only pain. There was already enough moonlight when they shook hands for each to see the gathered kindness in the other’s eyes.