“Oh, Alec, I believe I’m tired of college,” he said sadly, as they walked the dusk together.
“I think I am, too, in a way.”
“All I’d like would be a little home in the country, some warm country, and a wife, and just enough to do to keep from rotting.”
“Me, too.”
“I’d like to quit.”
“What does your girl say?”
“Oh!” Amory gasped in horror. “She wouldn’t think of marrying… that is, not now. I mean the future, you know.”
“My girl would. I’m engaged.”
“Are you really?”
“Yes. Don’t say a word to anybody, please, but I am. I may not come back next year.”
“But you’re only twenty! Give up college?”
“Why, Amory, you were saying a minute ago—”
“Yes,” Amory interrupted, “but I was just wishing. I wouldn’t think of leaving college. It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them. I wish my girl lived here. But marry—not a chance. Especially as father says the money isn’t forthcoming as it used to be.”
“What a waste these nights are!” agreed Alec.
But Amory sighed and made use of the nights. He had a snap-shot of Isabelle, enshrined in an old watch, and at eight almost every night he would turn off all the lights except the desk lamp and, sitting by the open windows with the picture before him, write her rapturous letters.
… Oh it’s so hard to write you what I really feel when I think about you so much; you’ve gotten to mean to me a dream that I can’t put on paper any more. Your last letter came and it was wonderful! I read it over about six times, especially the last part, but I do wish, sometimes, you’d be more frank and tell me what you really do think of me, yet your last letter was too good to be true, and I can hardly wait until June! Be sure and be able to come to the prom. It’ll be fine, I think, and I want to bring you just at the end of a wonderful year. I often think over what you said on that night and wonder how much you meant. If it were anyone but you—but you see I thought you were fickle the first time I saw you and you are so popular and everthing that I can’t imagine you really liking me best.
Oh, Isabelle, dear—it’s a wonderful night. Somebody is playing “Love Moon” on a mandolin far across the campus, and the music seems to bring you into the window. Now he’s playing “Good-by, Boys, I’m Through,” and how well it suits me. For I am through with everything. I have decided never to take a cocktail again, and I know I’ll never again fall in love—I couldn’t—you’ve been too much a part of my days and nights to ever let me think of another girl. I meet them all the time and they don’t interest me. I’m not pretending to be blasé, because it’s not that. It’s just that I’m in love. Oh, dearest Isabelle (somehow I can’t call you just Isabelle, and I’m afraid I’ll come out with the “dearest” before your family this June), you’ve got to come to the prom, and then I’ll come up to your house for a day and everything’ll be perfect….
And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them infinitely charming, infinitely new.
June came and the days grew so hot and lazy that they could not worry even about exams, but spent dreamy evenings on the court of Cottage, talking of long subjects until the sweep of country toward Stony Brook became a blue haze and the lilacs were white around tennis-courts, and words gave way to silent cigarettes…. Then down deserted Prospect and along McCosh with song everywhere around them, up to the hot joviality of Nassau Street.
Tom D’Invilliers and Amory walked late in those days. A gambling fever swept through the sophomore class and they bent over the bones till three o’clock many a sultry night. After one session they came out of Sloane’s room to find the dew fallen and the stars old in the sky.
“Let’s borrow bicycles and take a ride,” Amory suggested.
“All right. I’m not a bit tired and this is almost the last night of the year, really, because the prom stuff starts Monday.”
They found two unlocked bicycles in Holder Court and rode out about half-past three along the Lawrenceville Road.
“What are you going to do this summer, Amory?”
“Don’t ask me—same old things, I suppose. A month or two in Lake Geneva—I’m counting on you to be there in July, you know—then there’ll be Minneapolis, and that means hundreds of summer hops, parlor-snaking, getting bored—But oh, Tom,” he added suddenly, “hasn’t this year been slick!”
“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks, shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never want to play another. You’re all right—you’re a rubber ball, and somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties and the roll of their coats.”
“You can’t, Tom,” argued Amory, as they rolled along through the scattering night; “wherever you go now you’ll always unconsciously apply these standards of ‘having it’ or ‘lacking it.’ For better or worse we’ve stamped you; you’re a Princeton type!”
“Well, then,” complained Tom, his cracked voice rising plaintively, “why do I have to come back at all? I’ve learned all that Princeton has to offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and lying around a club aren’t going to help. They’re just going to disorganize me, conventionalize me completely. Even now I’m so spineless that I wonder how I get away with it.”
“Oh, but you’re missing the real point, Tom,” Amory interrupted. “You’ve just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the thoughtful man a social sense.”
“You consider you taught me that, don’t you?” he asked quizzically, eying Amory in the half dark.
Amory laughed quietly.
“Didn’t I?”
“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think you’re my bad angel. I might have been a pretty fair poet.”
“Come on, that’s rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern college. Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling quality of people, or you’d have gone through blind, and you’d hate to have done that—been like Marty Kaye.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “you’re right. I wouldn’t have liked it. Still, it’s hard to be made a cynic at twenty.”
“I was born one,” Amory murmured. “I’m a cynical idealist.” He paused and wondered if that meant anything.
They reached the sleeping school of Lawrenceville, and turned to ride back.
“It’s good, this ride, isn’t it?” Tom said presently.
“Yes; it’s a good finish, it’s knock-out; everything’s good tonight. Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!”
“Oh, you and your Isabelle! I’ll bet she’s a simple one… let’s say some poetry.”
So Amory declaimed “The Ode to a Nightingale” to the bushes they passed.
“I’ll never be a poet,” said Amory as he finished. “I’m not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things