This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald [best novels for teenagers TXT] 📗

as you want. She pauses. He’ll be a little neglected tonight. This is Rosalind’s week, you see. When a girl comes out, she needs all the attention. Rosalind

Outside. Well, then, prove it by coming here and hooking me.

Mrs. Connage goes.

Alec

Rosalind hasn’t changed a bit.

Cecelia

In a lower tone. She’s awfully spoiled.

Alec

She’ll meet her match tonight.

Cecelia

Who⁠—Mr. Amory Blaine?

Alec nods.

Cecelia

Well, Rosalind has still to meet the man she can’t outdistance. Honestly, Alec, she treats men terribly. She abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their faces⁠—and they come back for more.

Alec

They love it.

Cecelia

They hate it. She’s a⁠—she’s a sort of vampire, I think⁠—and she can make girls do what she wants usually⁠—only she hates girls.

Alec

Personality runs in our family.

Cecelia

Resignedly. I guess it ran out before it got to me.

Alec

Does Rosalind behave herself?

Cecelia

Not particularly well. Oh, she’s average⁠—smokes sometimes, drinks punch, frequently kissed⁠—Oh, yes⁠—common knowledge⁠—one of the effects of the war, you know.

Emerges Mrs. Connage.

Mrs. Connage

Rosalind’s almost finished so I can go down and meet your friend.

Alec and his mother go out.

Rosalind

Outside. Oh, mother⁠—

Cecelia

Mother’s gone down.

And now Rosalind enters. Rosalind is⁠—utterly Rosalind. She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative.

If Rosalind could be spoiled the process would have been complete by this time, and as a matter of fact, her disposition is not all it should be; she wants what she wants when she wants it and she is prone to make everyone around her pretty miserable when she doesn’t get it⁠—but in the true sense she is not spoiled. Her fresh enthusiasm, her will to grow and learn, her endless faith in the inexhaustibility of romance, her courage and fundamental honesty⁠—these things are not spoiled.

There are long periods when she cordially loathes her whole family. She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez-faire for others. She loves shocking stories: she has that coarse streak that usually goes with natures that are both fine and big. She wants people to like her, but if they do not it never worries her or changes her.

She is by no means a model character.

The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men. Rosalind had been disappointed in man after man as individuals, but she had great faith in man as a sex. Women she detested. They represented qualities that she felt and despised in herself⁠—incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty dishonesty. She once told a roomful of her mother’s friends that the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men. She danced exceptionally well, drew cleverly but hastily, and had a startling facility with words, which she used only in love-letters.

But all criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty. There was that shade of glorious yellow hair, the desire to imitate which supports the dye industry. There was the eternal kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual, and utterly disturbing. There were gray eyes and an unimpeachable skin with two spots of vanishing color. She was slender and athletic, without underdevelopment, and it was a delight to watch her move about a room, walk along a street, swing a golf club, or turn a “cartwheel.”

A last qualification⁠—her vivid, instant personality escaped that conscious, theatrical quality that Amory had found in Isabelle. Monsignor Darcy would have been quite up a tree whether to call her a personality or a personage. She was perhaps the delicious, inexpressible, once-in-a-century blend.

On the night of her debut she is, for all her strange, stray wisdom, quite like a happy little girl. Her mother’s maid has just done her hair, but she has decided impatiently that she can do a better job herself. She is too nervous just now to stay in one place. To that we owe her presence in this littered room. She is going to speak. Isabelle’s alto tones had been like a violin, but if you could hear Rosalind, you would say her voice was musical as a waterfall.

Rosalind

Honestly, there are only two costumes in the world that I really enjoy being in⁠—Combing her hair at the dressing-table. One’s a hoop skirt with pantaloons; the other’s a one-piece bathing-suit. I’m quite charming in both of them.

Cecelia

Glad you’re coming out?

Rosalind

Yes; aren’t you?

Cecelia

Cynically. You’re glad so you can get married and live on Long Island with the fast younger married set. You want life to be a chain of flirtation with a man for every link.

Rosalind

Want it to be one! You mean I’ve found it one.

Cecelia

Ha!

Rosalind

Cecelia, darling, you don’t know what a trial it is to be⁠—like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me. If I laugh hard from a front row in the theatre, the comedian plays to me for the rest of the evening. If I drop my voice, my eyes, my handkerchief at a dance, my partner calls me up on the phone every day for a week.

Cecelia

It must be an awful strain.

Rosalind

The unfortunate part is that the only men who interest me at all are the totally ineligible ones. Now⁠—if I were poor I’d go on the stage.

Cecelia

Yes, you might as well get paid for the amount of acting you do.

Rosalind

Sometimes when I’ve felt particularly radiant I’ve thought, why should this be wasted on one man?

Cecelia

Often when you’re particularly sulky, I’ve wondered why it should all be wasted on just one family. Getting up. I think I’ll go down and meet