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

day from college you go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first while the merits of going or staying are fairly clear in your mind. You let your imagination shinny on the side of your desires for a few hours, and then you decide. Naturally your imagination, after a little freedom, thinks up a million reasons why you should stay, so your decision when it comes isn’t true. It’s biased.”

“Yes,” objected Amory, “but isn’t it lack of willpower to let my imagination shinny on the wrong side?”

“My dear boy, there’s your big mistake. This has nothing to do with willpower; that’s a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgment⁠—the judgment to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you false, given half a chance.”

“Well, I’ll be darned!” exclaimed Amory in surprise, “that’s the last thing I expected.”

Clara didn’t gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she had started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He felt like a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of dishonesty finds that his own son, in the office, is changing the books once a week. His poor, mistreated will that he had been holding up to the scorn of himself and his friends, stood before him innocent, and his judgment walked off to prison with the unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee beside him. Clara’s was the only advice he ever asked without dictating the answer himself⁠—except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor Darcy.

How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with her was a rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had ever traded she was whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.

“I’ll bet she won’t stay single long.”

“Well, don’t scream it out. She ain’t lookin’ for no advice.”

“Ain’t she beautiful!”

Enter a floorwalker⁠—silence till he moves forward, smirking.

“Society person, ain’t she?”

“Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say.”

“Gee! girls, ain’t she some kid!”

And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople gave her discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes without it. He knew she dressed very well, had always the best of everything in the house, and was inevitably waited upon by the head floorwalker at the very least.

Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would walk beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water in the new air. She was very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light.

“St. Cecelia,” he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and the people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon and Clara and Amory turned to fiery red.

That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that night. He couldn’t help it.

They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak.

“I think,” he said and his voice trembled, “that if I lost faith in you I’d lose faith in God.”

She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the matter.

“Nothing,” she said slowly, “only this: five men have said that to me before, and it frightens me.”

“Oh, Clara, is that your fate!”

She did not answer.

“I suppose love to you is⁠—” he began.

She turned like a flash.

“I have never been in love.”

They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him⁠ ⁠… never in love.⁠ ⁠… She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary’s eternal significance. But quite mechanically he heard himself saying:

“And I love you⁠—any latent greatness that I’ve got is⁠ ⁠… oh, I can’t talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position to marry you⁠—”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said; “I’d never marry again. I’ve got my two children and I want myself for them. I like you⁠—I like all clever men, you more than any⁠—but you know me well enough to know that I’d never marry a clever man⁠—” She broke off suddenly.

“Amory.”

“What?”

“You’re not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did you?”

“It was the twilight,” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t feel as though I were speaking aloud. But I love you⁠—or adore you⁠—or worship you⁠—”

“There you go⁠—running through your catalogue of emotions in five seconds.”

He smiled unwillingly.

“Don’t make me out such a lightweight, Clara; you are depressing sometimes.”

“You’re not a lightweight, of all things,” she said intently, taking his arm and opening wide her eyes⁠—he could see their kindliness in the fading dusk. “A lightweight is an eternal nay.”

“There’s so much spring in the air⁠—there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.”

She dropped his arm.

“You’re all fine now, and I feel glorious. Give me a cigarette. You’ve never seen me smoke, have you? Well, I do, about once a month.”

And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like two mad children gone wild with pale-blue twilight.

“I’m going to the country for tomorrow,” she announced, as she stood panting, safe beyond the flare of the corner lamppost. “These days are too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel them more in the city.”

“Oh, Clara!” Amory said; “what a devil you could have been if the Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!”

“Maybe,” she answered; “but I think not. I’m never really wild and never have been. That little outburst was pure spring.”

“And you are, too,” said he.

They were walking along now.

“No⁠—you’re wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed brains be so constantly wrong about me? I’m the opposite of everything spring ever stood for. It’s unfortunate, if I happen to look like what pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I