F Scott Fitzgerald From His Early Works
He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in
him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the
triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful –
then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious
distance of the soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The
autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a
not altogether explained second, posing perversely time, his emotion had been
nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.
He finished his dressing, found a black bow tie and adjusted
it carefully by the three-sided mirror in the bathroom. Then yielding to an
impulse he walked quickly into the bedroom and again looked out the window. The
woman was standing up now; she had tossed her hair back and he has full view of
her. She was fat, full thirty five, utterly undistinguished. Making a licking
noise with his mouth he returned to the bathroom and reparted his hair.
“To you… beaut-if-ul lady,” he sang lightly.
“I raise…. My eyes – “
Then with a last soothing brush that left an iridescent
surface of sheer gloss he left his bathroom and his apartment and walked down
Fifth Avenue to the Ritz-Carlton.
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