Flappers and PhilosophersFitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott)
General
Flappers and Philosophers
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott)
Fiction; Short stories, American
Sally Carrol Happer, resting her chin on her arm, and her arm on
an old window-seat, gazed sleepily down over the spangled dust
whence the heat waves were rising for the first time this spring.
She was watching a very ancient Ford turn a perilous corner and
rattle and groan to a jolting stop at the end of the walk. See
made no sound and in a minute a strident familiar whistle rent
the air. Sally Carrol smiled and blinked.
"Good mawnin'."
A head appeared tortuously from under the car-top below.
"Tain't mawnin', Sally Carrol."
"Sure enough!" she said in affected surprise. "I guess maybe
not."
"What you doin'?"
"Eatin' a green peach. 'Spect to die any minute."
Clark twisted himself a last impossible notch to get a view of
her face.
"Water's warm as a kettla steam, Sally Carol. Wanta go swimmin'?"
"Hate to move," sighed Sally Carol lazily, "but I reckon so."
Head and Shoulders
In 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he
took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and
received the Grade A--excellent--in Cæsar, Cicero, Vergil,
Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and
Chemistry.
Two years later while George M. Cohan was composing "Over There,"
Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and
digging out theses on "The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic
Form," and during the battle of Château-Thierry he was sitting at
his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth
birthday before beginning his series of essays on "The Pragmatic
Bias of the New Realists."
After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he
was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would
get out their new edition of "Spinoza's Improvement of the
Understanding." Wars were all very well in their way, made young
men self-reliant or something but Horace felt that he could never
forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under
his window the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave
three important sentences out of his thesis on "German
Idealism."
The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of
Arts.
He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with near-sighted gray
eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere
words he let drop.
"I never feel as though I'm talking to him," expostulated
Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic colleague. "He makes me feel
as though I were talking to his representative. I always expect
him to say: 'Well, I'll ask myself and find out.'"
And then, just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been
Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in,
seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a
piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain-counter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account