“I’ll take it to her,” she said suddenly.
“Will you?” For the first time he seemed to see Gwen—a girl who looked like the pictures in the magazines, and yet was smaller than himself. He thrust the telegram at her. “Thanks! Gosh, I certainly am——”
“I’m not going downstairs alone,” she interrupted. “You’ve got to take me part way.”
As they descended, he looked at her again out of the corner of his eye; at the big arch he paused.
“Now you take it the rest of the way,” he said.
“The best way would be to do it together.”
“Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t say that. I’m not going to walk across the floor.”
“I didn’t mean walk. If we walked, everybody’d kind of look at us, but if we danced across to the box, nobody would notice it.”
“You said you’d take it!” he said indignantly.
“I will, but you’ve got to take me.” And she added innocently, “That makes it easy for us both.”
“I won’t do it,” he declared.
“Then you can take it yourself.”
“I never——”
Suddenly, before he realized it, she was in the circle of his arm, his hand was on what was apparently a forgotten seam in her dress just between shoulder blades, and they were moving across the floor.
Through the line of stags and out into the kaleidoscope. Gwen was at home; all hesitancy at the daring of her idea vanishing like the tension of a football player after the kick-off. By some inexorable right, this was her world. This was, perhaps, not the time set for entering it, but, maybe because her generation had ceased to move in the old Euclidian world, her age ceased to matter after a moment. She felt as old as any girl on the floor.
And now, miracle of miracles, the lights dimmed, and at the signal, the divine spark passed from one orchestra to another, and Gwen was dancing onward in a breathless trance to the melody of “Cheek to Cheek.”
In the Laurel Club box, the ladies were growing weary. Chaperonage, they decided, was too lightly undertaken, too poorly compensated for. They were tired of the parade of animation, of lovely, confident faces, and one of them said as much to the middle-aged man who sat at her side. He, too, wore the look of speculating upon the texture of cool pillowcases and the beatitude of absolute quiet.
“I had to come,” she said, “but I still don’t understand why you came.”
“Perhaps because I saw in the morning paper that you’d be here, after all these years.”
“This is no place to say that to a woman of my age; the competition makes me feel very old. Look at that odd-looking couple—like a pair of midgets. I haven’t seen them before.”
He looked, but they seemed like just the sort of eccentrics to wander into any doze, so, after vaguely replying, “Aren’t they cute?” he glazed his eyes for a while, until she commented: “There they are again. Such little people. That girl—why, she can’t be more than fourteen, and she’s like a blase, world-weary woman of twenty. Can you imagine what her parents could have been thinking of, to let her come here tonight?”
He looked again; then, after a long pause, he said, rather wearily:
“Yes, I can imagine.”
“You think it’s all right then?” she demanded. “Why, it seems to me——”
“No, Helen, I just meant I can imagine what they would be thinking if they knew about it. Because the girl seems to be my daughter.”
V
It was not in Bryan’s nature to rush out and snatch Gwen from the floor. Should she pass near him again, he intended to bow to her very formally indeed and let the next step be hers. He was not angry with her—he supposed her hostess was behind the matter—but he was angry at a system which permitted a baby disguised as a young woman, a marriageable young woman, to dance at a semipublic ball.
At his undergraduate club the next day, he wended his way from group to group, stopping to chat momentarily here and there, but with his eye always out for Gwen, who was to meet him there. When the crowd was drifting out and down to the stadium, he called the Rays’ house, and found her still there.
“You better meet me at the game,” he said, glad he had given her the ticket. “I want to go down now and see the teams practice.”
“Daddy, I hate to say it but I’ve lost it.” Her voice was hushed and solemn. “I searched and searched, and then I remembered I stuck it in the mirror at home with some invitations, to see how it would look, and forgot to——”
The connection was broken, and a male voice demanded if there were rooms at the club tonight and if the steward had delivered a brown lunch basket to Thomas Pickering, ’96. For ten minutes more he jangled the receiver; he wanted to tell her to buy a bad seat in the end stand and work her way around to him, but the phone service in Princeton shared the hysteria of the crowd.
People began going by the booth, looking at their watches and hurrying to get to the kick-off; in another five minutes there was no one going by the booth, and there was sweat upon Bryan’s brow. He had played freshman football in college; it meant to him what war or chess might have meant to his grandfather. Resentment possessed him suddenly.
“After all, she had her fun last night, and now I have a right to mine. Let her miss it. She doesn’t care, really.”
But on the way to the stadium he was torn between the human roar that went up at momentary intervals behind that massive wall and the picture of Gwen making a last desperate search for that precious counter that gleamed uselessly in a mirror at home.
He hardened himself.
“It’s that disorderliness. This will be a better lesson than any lecture.”
Nevertheless, at the very gate Bryan paused once more; he and Gwen were very close, and he could still go after her, but a huge swelling cry from the arena decided him; he went in with the last dribble of the crowd.
It was as he reached his seat that he saw that there was a hand signaling him, heard a voice hailing him.
“Oh, daddy, here we are! We thought maybe you’d——”
“Sit down,” he whispered, breathlessly slipping into his place. “People want to see. Did you find your ticket?”
“No, daddy. I had a terrible time—but this is Tommy Ray, daddy. He hasn’t got a seat here; he was just keeping your seat till you came. He can sit anywhere because he——”
“Be quiet, Baby! You can tell me later. What’s happened on the field? What’s on that Scoreboard?”
“What Scoreboard?”
From the aisle steps whither he had moved, Tommy supplied the information that it was nothing to nothing; Bryan bent his whole attention upon the game.
At the quarter, he relaxed and demanded:
“How did you manage to get in?”
“Well, you see, Tommy Ray”—she lowered her voice—“this boy beside me—he’s one of the ticket takers. And I knew he’d be somewhere, because he told me last night that was why he had to go home——”
She stopped herself.
“I understand,” Bryan said dryly. “I wondered what you found to talk about in that remarkable dancing position.”
“You were there?” she cried in dismay. “You——”
“Listen to that Harvard band,” he interrupted, “jazzing old marching songs—seems sort of irreverent. Of course, you’d probably like them to play ‘Cheek by Jowl.’”
“Daddy!”
But for a moment her eyes were far off on the gray horizon, listening, not to the band, but to that sweeter and somehow older tune.
“What did you think?” she asked, after a moment. “I mean when you saw me there?”
“What did I think? I thought you were just too cute for words.”
“You didn’t! I don’t care how you punish me, but please don’t ever say that horrible word again!”
“Too Cute for Words” was written at the Skyline Hotel, Hendersonville, North Carolina, in December 1935. It was planned as the first in a series of Gwen stories for the Post, on the model of the successful Basil (1928-1929) and Josephine (1930-1931) stories about adolescents. It is usually easier for a writer to continue a series of connected stories than to write independent stories, and Fitzgerald was trying desperately to increase his productivity. By this time Harold Ober was acting as both editor and agent—providing lists of suggestions for improving stories, which Fitzgerald tried to act on. On 29 December Ober was able to report that the Post had bought the first Gwen story, “Too Cute for Words,” for $3000 and was interested in the series. The second story, “Make Yourself at Home,” was declined. “Inside the House” was written in Baltimore in February-March 1936, and the Post paid $3000 for it. The fourth story, “The Pearl and the Fur,” was declined. After the characters’ names were changed, “Make Yourself at Home” and “The Pearl and the Fur” were sold to Pictorial Review, which did not publish them. “Make Yourself at Home” appears to have been finally published in 1939 as “Strange Sanctuary” in Liberty.
Gwen was based on Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie who was fourteen when the stories were written. She had seen Top Hat, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, seven times, and “drove Daddy crazy” playing the record of its hit song, “Cheek to Cheek.” “Inside the House” also draws on the occasion when Clark Gable came to lunch at the Baltimore
