Free This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by F. Scott Fitzgerald Page B

for years. Take a big chair and we’ll have a chat.”
    “I’ve just come from school—St. Regis’s, you know.”
    “So your mother says—a remarkable woman; have a cigarette—I’m sure you smoke. Well, if you’re like me, you loathe all science and mathematics—”
    Amory nodded vehemently.
    “Hate ’em all. Like English and history.”
    “Of course. You’ll hate school for a while, too, but I’m glad you’re going to St. Regis’s.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s a gentleman’s school, and democracy won’t hit you so early. You’ll find plenty of that in college.”
    “I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”
    Monsignor chuckled.
    “I’m one, you know.”
    “Oh, you’re different—I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic—you know, like a spring day. Harvard
    seems sort of indoors—”
    “And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor.
    “That’s it.”
    They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
    “I was for Bonnie Prince Charlie,” announced Amory.
    “Of course you were—and for Hannibal—”
    “Yes, and for the Southern Confederacy.” He was rather sceptical about being an Irish patriot—he suspected that being Irish was being somewhat common—but Monsignor assured him that Ireland was a romantic lost cause and Irish people quite charming, and that it should, by all means, be one of his principal biasses.
    After a crowded hour which included several more cigarettes, and during which Monsignor learned, to his surprise but not to his horror, that Amory had not been brought up a Catholic, he announced that he had another guest. This turned out to be the Honorable Thornton Hancock, of Boston, ex-minister to The Hague, author of an erudite history of the Middle Ages and the last of a distinguished, patriotic, and brilliant family.
    “He comes here for a rest,” said Monsignor confidentially, treating Amory as a contemporary. “I act as an escape from the weariness of agnosticism, and I think I’m the only man who knows how his staid old mind is really at sea and longs for a sturdy spar like the Church to cling to.”
    Their first luncheon was one of the memorable events of Amory’s early life. He was quite radiant and gave off a peculiar brightness and charm. Monsignor called out the best that he had thought by question and suggestion, and Amory talked with an ingenious brilliance of a thousand impulses and desires and repulsions and faiths and fears. He and Monsignor held the floor, and the older man, with his less receptive, less accepting, yet certainly not colder mentality, seemed content to listen and bask in the mellow sunshine that played between these two. Monsignor gave the effect of sunlight to many people; Amory gave it in his youth and, to some extent, when he was very much older, but never again was it quite so mutually spontaneous.
    “He’s a radiant boy,” thought Thornton Hancock, who had seen the splendor of two continents and talked with Parnell and Glad-stone and Bismarck—and afterward he added to Monsignor: “But his education ought not to be intrusted to a school or college.”
    But for the next four years the best of Amory’s intellect was concentrated on matters of popularity, the intricacies of a university social system and American Society as represented by Biltmore Teas and Hot Springs golf-links.
    ... In all, a wonderful week, that saw Amory’s mind turned inside out, a hundred of his theories confirmed, and his joy of life crystallized to a thousand ambitions. Not that the conversation was scholastic—heaven forbid! Amory had only the vaguest idea as to what Bernard Shaw was—but Monsignor made quite as much out of “The Beloved Vagabond” and “Sir Nigel,” taking good care that Amory never once felt out of his