The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald [158]
The streets near the apartment, Anthony had found, were streets where children played—streets a little nicer than those he had been used to pass on his way to Marietta, but of the same general sort, with an occasional hand organ or hurdy-gurdy, and in the cool of the evening many pairs of young girls walking down to the corner drug-store for ice cream soda and dreaming unlimited dreams under the low heavens.
Dusk in the streets now, and children playing, shouting up incoherent ecstatic words that faded out close to the open window—and Muriel, who had come to find Gloria, chattering to him from an opaque gloom over across the room.
"Light the lamp, why don't we?" she suggested. "It's getting ghostly in here."
With a tired movement he arose and obeyed; the gray window-panes vanished. He stretched himself. He was heavier now, his stomach was a limp weight against his belt; his flesh had softened and expanded. He was thirty-two and his mind was a bleak and disordered wreck.
"Have a little drink, Muriel?"
"Not me, thanks. I don't use it anymore. What're you doing these days, Anthony?" she asked curiously.
"Well, I've been pretty busy with this lawsuit," he answered indifferently. "It's gone to the Court of Appeals—ought to be settled up one way or another by autumn. There's been some objection as to whether the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over the matter."
Muriel made a clicking sound with her tongue and cocked her head on one side.
"Well, you tell'em! I never heard of anything taking so long."
"Oh, they all do," he replied listlessly; "all will cases. They say it's exceptional to have one settled under four or five years."
"Oh ..." Muriel daringly changed her tack, "why don't you go to work, you la-azy!"
"At what?" he demanded abruptly.
"Why, at anything, I suppose. You're still a young man."
"If that's encouragement, I'm much obliged," he answered dryly—and then with sudden weariness: "Does it bother you particularly that I don't want to work?"
"It doesn't bother me—but, it does bother a lot of people who claim—"
"Oh, God!" he said brokenly, "it seems to me that for three years I've heard nothing about myself but wild stories and virtuous admonitions. I'm tired of it. If you don't want to see us, let us alone. I don't bother my former friends.' But I need no charity calls, and no criticism disguised as good advice—" Then he added apologetically: "I'm sorry—but really, Muriel, you mustn't talk like a lady slum-worker even if you are visiting the lower middle classes." He turned his bloodshot eyes on her reproachfully—eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue, that were weak now, strained, and half-ruined from reading when he was drunk.
"Why do you say such awful things?" she protested. You talk as if you and Gloria were in the middle classes."
"Why pretend we're not? I hate people who claim to be great aristocrats when they can't even keep up the appearances of it."
"Do you think a person has to have money to be aristocratic?"
Muriel ... the horrified democrat ...!
"Why, of course. Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine—courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing—can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity."
Muriel bit her lower lip and waved her head from side to side.
"Well, all I say is that if a person comes from a good family they're always nice people. That's the trouble with you and Gloria. You think that just because things aren't going your way right now