The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald [163]
Anthony Patch walked away in a sudden fit of depression, pondering the bitterness of such survivals. There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.
On Forty-second Street one afternoon he met Richard Caramel for the first time in many months, a prosperous, fattening Richard Caramel, whose face was filling out to match the Bostonian brow.
"Just got in this week from the coast. Was going to call you up, but I didn't know your new address."
"We've moved."
Richard Caramel noticed that Anthony was wearing a soiled shirt, that his cuffs were slightly but perceptibly frayed, that his eyes were set in half-moons the color of cigar smoke.
"So I gathered," he said, fixing his friend with his bright-yellow eye. "But where and how is Gloria? My God, Anthony, I've been hearing the dog-gonedest stories about you two even out in California—and when I get back to New York I find you've sunk absolutely out of sight. Why don't you pull yourself together?"
"Now, listen," chattered Anthony unsteadily, "I can't stand a long lecture. We've lost money in a dozen ways, and naturally people have talked—on account of the lawsuit, but the thing's coming to a final decision this winter, surely—"
"You're talking so fast that I can't understand you," interrupted Dick calmly.
"Well, I've said all I'm going to say," snapped Anthony. "Come and see us if you like—or don't!"
With this he turned and started to walk off in the crowd, but Dick overtook him immediately and grasped his arm.
"Say, Anthony, don't fly off the handle so easily! You know Gloria's my cousin, and you're one of my oldest friends, so it's natural for me to be interested when I hear that you're going to the dogs—and taking her with you."
"I don't want to be preached to."
"Well, then, all right—How about coming up to my apartment and having a drink? I've just got settled. I've bought three cases of Gordon gin from a revenue officer."
As they walked along he continued in a burst of exasperation:
"And how about your grandfather's money—you going to get it?"
"Well," answered Anthony resentfully, "that old fool Haight seems hopeful, especially because people are tired of reformers right now—you know it might make a slight difference, for instance, if some judge thought that Adam Patch made it harder for him to get liquor."
"You can't do without money," said Dick sententiously. "Have you tried to write any—lately?"
Anthony shook his head silently.
"That's funny," said Dick. "I always thought that you and Maury would write some day, and now he's grown to be a sort of tight-fisted aristocrat, and you're—"
"I'm the bad example."
"I wonder why?"
"You probably think you know," suggested Anthony, with an effort at concentration. "The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father's mistakes."
"I don't agree with you," said the author of "A Shave-tail in France." "I used to listen to you and Maury when we were young, and I used to be impressed because you were so consistently cynical, but now—well, after all, by God, which of us three has taken to the—to the intellectual life? I don't want to sound vainglorious, but—it's me, and I've always believed that moral values existed, and I always will."
"Well," objected Anthony, who was rather enjoying himself, "even granting that, you know that in practice life never presents problems as clear cut, does it?"
"It does to me. There's nothing I'd violate certain principles for."
"But how do you know when you're violating them? You have to guess at things just