Emotional Bankruptcy, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

“There’s that nut with the spyglass again,” remarked Josephine. Lillian Hammel unhooked a lace sofa cushion from her waist and came to the window. “He’s standing back so we can’t see him. He’s looking at the room above.”

The peeper was working from a house on the other side of narrow Sixty-eighth street, all unconscious that his activities were a matter of knowledge and, lately, of indifference to the pupils of Miss Truby’s finishing school. They had even identified him as the undistinguished but quite proper young man who issued from the house with a briefcase at eight every morning, apparently oblivious of the school across the street.

“What a horrible person,” said Lillian.

“They’re all the same,” Josephine said. “I’ll bet almost every man we know would do the same thing, if he had a telescope and nothing to do in the afternoon. I’ll bet Louie Randall would, anyhow.”

“Josephine, is he actually following you to Princeton?” Lillian asked.

“Yes, dearie.”

“Doesn’t he think he’s got his nerve?”

“He’ll get away with it,” Josephine assured her.

“Won’t Paul be wild?”

“I can’t worry about that. I only know half a dozen boys at Princeton, and with Louie I know I’ll have at least one good dancer to depend on. Paul’s too short for me, and he’s a bum dancer anyhow.”

Not that Josephine was very tall; she was an exquisite size for seventeen and of a beauty that was flowering marvelously day by day into something richer and warmer. People gasped nowadays, whereas a year ago they would merely have stared, and scarcely glanced at her a year before that. She was manifestly to be the spectacular debutante of Chicago next year, in spite of the fact that she was an egotist who played not for popularity but for individual men. While Josephine always recovered, the men frequently didn’t—her mail from Chicago, from New Haven, from the Yale Battery on the border, averaged a dozen letters a day.

This was in the fall of 1916, with the thunder of far-off guns already growing louder on the air. When the two girls started for the Princeton prom two days later, they carried with them the Poems of Alan Seeger, supplemented by copies of Smart Set and Snappy Stories, bought surreptitiously at the station news stand. When compared to a seventeen-year-old girl of today, Lillian Hammel was an innocent; Josephine Perry, however, belonged to the ages.

They read nothing en route save a few love epigrams beginning: “A woman of thirty is—” The train was crowded and a sustained, excited chatter flowed along the aisles of the coaches. There were very young girls in a gallantly concealed state of terror; there were privately bored girls who would never see twenty-five again; there were unattractive girls, blandly unconscious of what was in store; and there were little, confident parties who felt as though they were going home.

“They say it’s not like Yale,” said Josephine. “They don’t do things so elaborately here. They don’t rush you from place to place, from one tea to another, like they do at New Haven.”

“Will you ever forget that divine time last spring?” exclaimed Lillian.

They both sighed.

“At least there’ll be Louie Randall,” said Josephine.

There would indeed be Louie Randall, whom Josephine had seen fit to invite herself, without the formality of telling her Princeton escort that he was coming. The escort, at that moment pacing up and down at the station platform with many other young men, was probably under the impression that it was his party. But he was wrong; it was Josephine’s party; even Lillian was coming with another Princeton man, named Martin Munn, whom Josephine had thoughtfully provided. “Please ask her,” she had written. “We’ll manage to see a lot of each other, if you do, because the man I’m coming with isn’t really very keen about me, so he won’t mind.”

But Paul Dempster cared a lot; so much so that when the train came puffing up from the Junction he gulped a full pint of air, which is a mild form of swooning. He had been devoted to Josephine for a year—long after her own interest had waned—he had long lost any power of judging her objectively; she was become simply a projection of his own dreams, a radiant, nebulous mass of light.

But Josephine saw Paul clearly enough as they stepped off the train. She gave herself up to him immediately, as if to get it over with, to clear the decks for more vital action.

“So thrilled—so thrilled! So darling to ask me!” Immemorial words, still doing service after fifteen years.

She took his arm snugly, settling it in hers with a series of little readjustments, as if she wanted it right because it was going to be there forever.

“I bet you’re not glad to see me at all,” she whispered. “I’ll bet you’ve forgotten me. I know you.”

Rudimentary stuff, but it sent Paul Dempster into a confused and happy trance. He had the adequate surface of nineteen, but, within, all was still in a ferment of adolescence.

He could only answer gruffly: “Big chance.” And then: “Martin had a chemistry lab. He’ll meet us at the club.”

Slowly the crowd of youth swirled up the steps and beneath Blair arch, floating in an autumn dream and scattering the yellow leaves with their feet. Slowly they moved between stretches of greensward under the elms and cloisters, with breath misty upon the crisp evening, following the hope that lay just ahead, the goal of happiness almost reached.

They sat before a big fire in the Witherspoon Club, the largest of those undergraduate mansions for which Princeton is famous. Martin Munn, Lillian’s escort, was a quiet, handsome boy whom Josephine had met several times, but whose sentimental nature she had not explored. Now, with the phonograph playing Down Among the Sheltering Palms, with the soft orange light of the great room glowing upon the scattered groups, who seemed to have brought in the atmosphere of infinite promise from outside, Josephine looked at him appraisingly. A familiar current of curiosity coursed through her; already her replies to Paul had grown abstracted. But still in the warm enchantment of the walk from the station, Paul did not notice. He was far from guessing that he had already been served his ration; of special attention he would get no more. He was now cast for another rфle.

At the exact moment when it was suggested that they dress for dinner the party became aware of an individual who had just entered the club and was standing by the entrance looking not exactly at home, for he blinked about unfamiliarly, but not in the least ill at ease. He was tall, with long, dancing legs, and his face was that of an old, experienced weasel to whom no henhouse was impregnable.

“Why, Louie Randall!” exclaimed Josephine in a tone of astonishment.

She talked to him for a moment as if unwillingly, and then introduced him all around, meanwhile whispering to Paul: “He’s a boy from New Haven. I never dreamed he’d follow me down here.”

Randall within a few minutes was somehow one of the party. He had a light and witty way about him; no dark suspicions had penetrated Paul’s mind.

“Oh, by the way,” said Louie Randall, “I wonder if I can find a place to change my clothes. I’ve got a suitcase outside.”

There was a pause. Josephine was apparently uninterested. The pause grew difficult, and Paul heard himself saying: “You can change in my room if you want to.”

“I don’t want to put you out.”

“Not at all.”

Josephine raised her eyebrows at Paul, disclaiming responsibility for the man’s presumption; a moment later, Randall said: “Do you live near here?”

“Pretty near.”

“Because I have a taxi and I could take you there if you’re going to change, and you could show me where it is. I don’t want to put you out.”

The repetition of this ambiguous statement suggested that otherwise Paul might find his belongings in the street. He rose unwillingly; he did not hear Josephine whisper to Martin Munn: “Please don’t you go yet.” But Lillian did, and without minding at all. Her love affairs never conflicted with Josephine’s, which is why they had been intimate friends so long. When Louie Randall and his involuntary host had departed, she excused herself and went to dress upstairs.

“I’d like to see all over the clubhouse,” suggested Josephine. She felt the old excitement mounting in her pulse, felt her cheeks begin to glow like an electric heater.

“These are the private dining rooms,” Martin explained as they walked around… “The billiard room… The squash courts… This library is modeled on something in a Cercersion monastery in—in India or somewhere… This”—he opened a door and peered in—“this is the president’s room, but I don’t know where the light is.”

Josephine walked in with a little laugh. “It’s very nice in here,” she said. “You can’t see anything at all. Oh, what have I run into? Come and save me!”

When they emerged a few minutes later, Martin smoothed back his hair hurriedly.

“You darling!” he said.

Josephine made a funny little clicking sound.

“What is it?” he demanded. “Why have you got such a funny look on your face?”

Josephine didn’t answer.

“Have I done something? Are you angry? You look as if you’d seen a ghost,” he said.

“You haven’t done anything,” she answered, and added, with an effort: “You were—sweet.” She shuddered. “Show me my room, will you?”

“How strange,” she was thinking. “He’s so attractive, but I didn’t enjoy kissing him at all. For the first time in my life—even when it was a man I didn’t especially care for—I had no feeling about him at