This Side of Paradise F. Scott Fitzgerald (mini ebook reader .txt) 📖

usually occupied by his desk, bearing a sign which read “Property of Dean Hollister. Bought and Paid for.”⁠ ⁠… It took two expert mechanics half a day to dissemble it into its minutest parts and remove it, which only goes to prove the rare energy of sophomore humor under efficient leadership.

Then again, that very fall, Burne had caused a sensation. A certain Phyllis Styles, an intercollegiate prom-trotter, had failed to get her yearly invitation to the Harvard⁠–⁠Princeton game.

Jesse Ferrenby had brought her to a smaller game a few weeks before, and had pressed Burne into service⁠—to the ruination of the latter’s misogyny.

“Are you coming to the Harvard game?” Burne had asked indiscreetly, merely to make conversation.

“If you ask me,” cried Phyllis quickly.

“Of course I do,” said Burne feebly. He was unversed in the arts of Phyllis, and was sure that this was merely a vapid form of kidding. Before an hour had passed he knew that he was indeed involved. Phyllis had pinned him down and served him up, informed him the train she was arriving by, and depressed him thoroughly. Aside from loathing Phyllis, he had particularly wanted to stag that game and entertain some Harvard friends.

“She’ll see,” he informed a delegation who arrived in his room to josh him. “This will be the last game she ever persuades any young innocent to take her to!”

“But, Burne⁠—why did you invite her if you didn’t want her?”

“Burne, you know you’re secretly mad about her⁠—that’s the real trouble.”

“What can you do, Burne? What can you do against Phyllis?”

But Burne only shook his head and muttered threats which consisted largely of the phrase: “She’ll see, she’ll see!”

The blithesome Phyllis bore her twenty-five summers gayly from the train, but on the platform a ghastly sight met her eyes. There were Burne and Fred Sloane arrayed to the last dot like the lurid figures on college posters. They had bought flaring suits with huge peg-top trousers and gigantic padded shoulders. On their heads were rakish college hats, pinned up in front and sporting bright orange-and-black bands, while from their celluloid collars blossomed flaming orange ties. They wore black armbands with orange “P’s,” and carried canes flying Princeton pennants, the effect completed by socks and peeping handkerchiefs in the same color motifs. On a clanking chain they led a large, angry tomcat, painted to represent a tiger.

A good half of the station crowd was already staring at them, torn between horrified pity and riotous mirth, and as Phyllis, with her svelte jaw dropping, approached, the pair bent over and emitted a college cheer in loud, far-carrying voices, thoughtfully adding the name “Phyllis” to the end. She was vociferously greeted and escorted enthusiastically across the campus, followed by half a hundred village urchins⁠—to the stifled laughter of hundreds of alumni and visitors, half of whom had no idea that this was a practical joke, but thought that Burne and Fred were two varsity sports showing their girl a collegiate time.

Phyllis’s feelings as she was paraded by the Harvard and Princeton stands, where sat dozens of her former devotees, can be imagined. She tried to walk a little ahead, she tried to walk a little behind⁠—but they stayed close, that there should be no doubt whom she was with, talking in loud voices of their friends on the football team, until she could almost hear her acquaintances whispering:

“Phyllis Styles must be awfully hard up to have to come with those two.”

That had been Burne, dynamically humorous, fundamentally serious. From that root had blossomed the energy that he was now trying to orient with progress.⁠ ⁠…

So the weeks passed and March came and the clay feet that Amory looked for failed to appear. About a hundred juniors and seniors resigned from their clubs in a final fury of righteousness, and the clubs in helplessness turned upon Burne their finest weapon: ridicule. Everyone who knew him liked him⁠—but what he stood for (and he began to stand for more all the time) came under the lash of many tongues, until a frailer man than he would have been snowed under.

“Don’t you mind losing prestige?” asked Amory one night. They had taken to exchanging calls several times a week.

“Of course I don’t. What’s prestige, at best?”

“Some people say that you’re just a rather original politician.”

He roared with laughter.

“That’s what Fred Sloane told me today. I suppose I have it coming.”

One afternoon they dipped into a subject that had interested Amory for a long time⁠—the matter of the bearing of physical attributes on a man’s makeup. Burne had gone into the biology of this, and then:

“Of course health counts⁠—a healthy man has twice the chance of being good,” he said.

“I don’t agree with you⁠—I don’t believe in ‘muscular Christianity.’ ”

“I do⁠—I believe Christ had great physical vigor.”

“Oh, no,” Amory protested. “He worked too hard for that. I imagine that when he died he was a broken-down man⁠—and the great saints haven’t been strong.”

“Half of them have.”

“Well, even granting that, I don’t think health has anything to do with goodness; of course, it’s valuable to a great saint to be able to stand enormous strains, but this fad of popular preachers rising on their toes in simulated virility, bellowing that calisthenics will save the world⁠—no, Burne, I can’t go that.”

“Well, let’s waive it⁠—we won’t get anywhere, and besides I haven’t quite made up my mind about it myself. Now, here’s something I do know⁠—personal appearance has a lot to do with it.”

“Coloring?” Amory asked eagerly.

“Yes.”

“That’s what Tom and I figured,” Amory agreed. “We took the yearbooks for the last ten years and looked at the pictures of the senior council. I know you don’t think much of that august body, but it does represent success here in a general way. Well, I suppose only about thirty-five percent of every class here are blonds, are really light⁠—yet two-thirds of every senior council are light. We looked at pictures of ten years of them, mind you; that means that out of every fifteen light-haired men in