Dissatisfaction

On Thursday afternoon Gloria and Anthony had tea together in the grill room at the Plaza. She seemed so young, scarcely eighteen; her form was amazingly supple and slender, and her hands were small as a child’s hands should be.

Gloria considered several locations, and rather to Anthony’s annoyance paraded him to a table for two at the far side of the room. Would she sit on the right or on the left? Anthony thought again how naïve was her every gesture.

She watched the dancers, commenting murmurously.

“There’s a pretty girl in blue, there! No. Behind you – there!”

“Yes,” he agreed helplessly.

“You didn’t see her.”

“I’d rather look at you.”

“I know, but she was pretty. Except that she had big ankles.”

“Did she?” he said indifferently.

A girl’s salutation came from a couple dancing close to them.

“Hello, Gloria! O Gloria!”

“Hello there.”

“Who’s that?” he demanded.

“I don’t know. Somebody.” She caught sight of another face. “Hello, Muriel!” Then to Anthony: “There’s Muriel Kane^[18]. Now I think she’s attractive, but not very.”

Anthony chuckled.

“Attractive, but not very,” he repeated.

She smiled.

“Why is that funny? Do you want to dance?”

“Do you?”

“Sort of. But let’s sit,” she decided.

“And talk about you? You love to talk about you, don’t you?”

“Yes.” She laughed.

“I imagine your autobiography is a classic.”

“Dick says I haven’t got one.”

“Dick!” he exclaimed. “What does he know about you?”

“Nothing. But he says the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms.”

“He’s talking from his book.”

“He says unloved women have no biographies – they have histories.”

Anthony laughed again.

“Then why haven’t you a biography? Haven’t you ever had a kiss that counted?”

“I don’t know what you mean ‘counts,’” she objected.

“I wish you’d tell me how old you are.”

“Twenty-two,” she said. “How old did you think?”

“About eighteen.”

“Let’s be eighteen, then. I don’t like being twenty-two. I hate it more than anything in the world.”

“Being twenty-two?”

“No. Getting old and everything. Getting married.”

“Don’t you ever want to marry?”

“I don’t want to have responsibility and a lot of children to take care of.”

He waited rather breathlessly for her next remark. She was smiling, without amusement but pleasantly.

“What do you do with yourself?^[19]” she asked.

Anthony was in a mood to talk. He wanted, moreover, to impress this girl. He wanted to pose.

“I do nothing,” he began. “I do nothing, for there’s nothing I can do that’s worth doing.”

“Well?” He had not surprised her.

“Don’t you approve of lazy men?”

She nodded.

“I want to know just why it’s impossible for an American to be gracefully idle, it astonishes me.

I don’t understand why people think that every young man ought to go downtown and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work.”

She watched him inscrutably. He waited for her to agree or disagree, but she did neither.

“Don’t you ever form judgments on things?” he asked with some exasperation.

She shook her head and her eyes wandered back to the dancers as she answered:

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about – what you should do, or what anybody should do. I don’t mind if people don’t do anything. I don’t see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything.”

“You don’t want to do anything?”

“I want to sleep.”

“Sleep?”

“Sort of. I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe. And some of them can do nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me. But I never want to change people.”

“You’re a little determinist,” laughed Anthony. “It’s your world, isn’t it?”

“Well,” she said, “isn’t it? As long as I’m – young.”

She paused slightly before the last word and Anthony suspected that she wanted to say “beautiful.”

Admiration

That winter afternoon at the Plaza was the first of a succession of “dates” Anthony made with her before Christmas. Invariably she was busy. She attended the charity dances at the big hotels; he saw her several times at dinner parties.

He made engagements with her several times for lunch and tea. She was sleepy, incapable of concentrating upon anything.

One Sunday afternoon just before Christmas he called up and found her after some important but mysterious quarrel.

“Let’s go to something!” she proposed. “I want to see a show, don’t you? Oh, let’s go somewhere!”

“We’ll go to a good cabaret.”

“I’ve seen every one in town.”

“Well, we’ll find a new one.”

“Well, come on, then.”

A dozen blocks down Broadway Anthony’s eyes were caught by a large and unfamiliar electric sign “Marathon” in glorious yellow script.

“Shall we try it?”

With a sigh Gloria tossed her cigarette out the open door; then they had passed under the screaming sign, under the wide portal, and up by a stuffy elevator into this palace of pleasure.

There on Sunday nights gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid, overworked people: book-keepers, ticket-sellers, office-managers, salesmen, and, most of all, clerks – clerks of the mail, of the grocery, of the brokerage, of the bank.

Anthony and Gloria sat down.

“How do you like it?” inquired Anthony.

“I love it,” she said frankly. Her gray eyes roved here and there, drowsing on each group, passing to the next. They two, it seemed to him, were alone quiet.

“I’m like these people,” she murmured. “I’m like they are – like Japanese lanterns and crape paper, and the music of that orchestra. I am like them. You don’t know me.” She hesitated. “These people could appreciate me, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyze me and tell me I’m this because of this or that because of that.”

Chapter III

Gloria

From his undergraduate days Richard Caramel had desired to write.

“I’m absorbed, Aunt Catherine,” he told his aunt, “I really am. All my friends are joshing me – but I don’t care.”

“You’re an ancient soul, I always say.”

“Maybe I am. But where is my cousin Gloria? I think my friend Anthony Patch is in love with her.”

Mrs. Gilbert started,

“Really?”

“I think so,” said Dick gravely. “She’s the first girl I’ve ever seen him with.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Gilbert “Gloria is very secretive. Between you and me,” she bent forward, “between you and me, I’d like to see her settle down.”

“I’m not claiming I’m right,” Dick said. “But I think Anthony is interested. He talks about her constantly.”

“Gloria is a very young soul,” began Mrs. Gilbert eagerly, but her nephew interrupted with a hurried sentence:

“Gloria would be very young and silly not to marry him.” He stopped. “Gloria’s a wild one, Aunt Catherine. She’s uncontrollable.”

She knew; oh, yes, mothers see these things. But what could she do? At sixteen Gloria began going to dances at schools, and then came the colleges; and everywhere she went, boys, boys, boys. Sometimes the men were undergraduates, sometimes just out of college – they lasted on an average of several months each. Once or twice her mother had hoped she would be engaged, but always a new one came.

Geraldine

It was Monday and Anthony took Geraldine Burke to luncheon, afterward they went up to his apartment.

Geraldine Burke had been an amusement of several months. She demanded so little that he liked her.

“You drink all the time, don’t you?” she said suddenly.

“Why, I suppose so,” replied Anthony in some surprise. “Don’t you?”

“No. I go on parties sometimes – you know, about once a week, but I only take two or three drinks. You and your friends keep on drinking all the time. I should think you’d ruin your health.”

Anthony was somewhat touched.

“You worry about me!”

“Well, I do.”

“I don’t drink so very much,” he declared. “Last month I didn’t touch a drop for three weeks. And I’m really drunk only once a week.”

“But you drink every day and you’re only twenty-five. Haven’t you any ambition? Think what you’ll be at forty?”

“I sincerely trust that I won’t live that long.”

“You cra-azy!” she said – and then: “Are you any relation to Adam Patch?”

“Yes, he’s my grandfather.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s funny. My daddy used to work for him. Tell me about him.”

“Why,” Anthony considered, “he’s very moral.”

“He’s done a lot of good,” said Geraldine with intense gravity. “Why don’t you live with him?”

“Why should I live with a pastor?”

“You cra-azy!”

Anthony thought how moral was this little waif at heart.

“Do you hate him?”

“I don’t know. I never liked him. You never like people who do things for you.”

“Does he hate you?”

“My dear Geraldine,” protested Anthony, frowning humorously, “do have another cocktail. I annoy him. He’s a prig, a bore, and something of a hypocrite.”

“Why do you call him a hypocrite?”

“Well,” said Anthony impatiently, “maybe he’s not. But he doesn’t like the things that I like.”

“Hm.” Her curiosity seemed satisfied. She sank back into the sofa and sipped her cocktail.

“You’re a funny one,” she commented thoughtfully. “Does everybody want to marry you because your grandfather is rich?”

“They don’t – but I shouldn’t blame them if they did. Still, you see, I never intend to marry.”

“You’ll fall in love someday. Oh, you will – I know.” She nodded wisely. “You will get married, just wait and see.”

“You’re a little idiot, Geraldine.”

She smiled provokingly.

“Oh, I am, am I? Want to bet?”

“That’d be silly too.”

“Oh, it would, would it? Well, I’ll just bet you’ll marry somebody inside of a year.”

“Geraldine,” he said, “in the first place I have no one I want to marry. In the second place I haven’t enough money to support two people. In the third place I am entirely opposed to marriage for people of my type. In the fourth place I have a strong distaste for even the consideration of it.”

Geraldine said she must be going. It was late.

“Call me up soon,” she reminded him as he kissed her goodbye, “you haven’t for three weeks, you know.”

“I will,” he promised fervently.

Magic

Anthony was convinced that no woman he had ever met compared in any way with Gloria. She was deeply herself; she was immeasurably sincere – of these things he was certain. Beside her the two dozen schoolgirls, young married women and waifs and strays whom he had known were just females, nothing more.

He went to the phone and called up the Plaza Hotel. Gloria was out. Her mother knew neither where she had gone nor when she would return.