Free The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald

the Taft Grill. A wave of exasperation swept over her— he was criticising her.
    “That’s the vibration that thr-ills me,
Funny how affection fi-lls me,
Uptown, downtown——”
    Unconquerable revulsion seized her. She was suddenly and horribly conscious of her audience as she had never been since her first appearance. Was that a leer on a pallid face in the front row, a droop of disgust on one young girl’s mouth? These shoulders of hers—these shoulders shaking—were they hers? Were they real? Surely shoulders weren’t made for this!
    “Then—you’ll see at a glance
I’ll need some funeral ushers with St. Vitus dance 22
At the end of the world I’ll——”
    The bassoon and two cellos crashed into a final chord. She paused and poised a moment on her toes with every muscle tense, her young face looking out dully at the audience in what one young girl afterward called “such a curious, puzzled look,” and then without bowing rushed from the stage. Into the dressing-room she sped, kicked out of one dress and into another, and caught a taxi outside.
    Her apartment was very warm—small, it was, with a row of professional pictures and sets of Kipling 23 and O. Henry 24 which she had bought once from a blue-eyed agent and read occasionally. And there were several chairs which matched, but were none of them comfortable, and a pink-shaded lamp with blackbirds painted on it and an atmosphere of rather stifled pink throughout. There were nice things in it—nice things unrelentingly hostile to each other, offsprings of a vicarious, impatient taste acting in stray moments. The worst was typified by a great picture framed in oak bark of Passaic as seen from the Erie Railroad—altogether a frantic, oddly extravagant, oddly penurious attempt to make a cheerful room. Marcia knew it was a failure.
    Into this room came the prodigy and took her two hands awkwardly.
    “I followed you this time,” he said.
    “Oh!”
    “I want you to marry me,” he said.
    Her arms went out to him. She kissed his mouth with a sort of passionate wholesomeness.
    “There!”
    “I love you,” he said.
    She kissed him again and then with a little sigh flung herself into an armchair and half lay there, shaken with absurd laughter.
    “Why, you infant prodigy!” she cried.
    “Very well, call me that if you want to. I once told you that I was ten thousand years older than you—I am.”
    She laughed again.
    “I don’t like to be disapproved of.”
    “No one’s ever going to disapprove of you again.”
    “Omar,” she asked, “why do you want to marry me?”
    The prodigy rose and put his hands in his pockets.
    “Because I love you, Marcia Meadow.”
    And then she stopped calling him Omar.
    “Dear boy,” she said, “you know I sort of love you. There’s something about you—I can’t tell what—that just puts my heart through the wringer every time I’m round you. But, honey—” She paused.
    “But what?”
    “But lots of things. But you’re only just eighteen, and I’m nearly twenty.”
    “Nonsense!” he interrupted. “Put it this way—that I’m in my nineteenth year and you’re nineteen. That makes us pretty close—without counting that other ten thousand years I mentioned.”
    Marcia laughed.
    “But there are some more ‘buts.’ Your people——”
    “My people!” exclaimed the prodigy ferociously. “My people tried to make a monstrosity out of me.” His face grew quite crimson at the enormity of what he was going to say. “My people can go way back and sit down!”
    “My heavens!” cried Marcia in alarm. “All that? On tacks, I suppose.”
    “Tacks—yes,” he agreed wildly—“on anything. The more I think of how they allowed me to become a little dried-up mummy——”
    “What makes you think you’re that?” asked Marcia quietly—“me?”
    “Yes. Every person I’ve met on the streets since I met you has made me jealous because they knew what love was before I did. I used to call it the