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her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families;
When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her.
She fed him sections of the “Fêtes Galantes” before he was ten; at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven.
The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of Lake Geneva;
Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the floating population of ex-Westerners.
“They pick up old, moth-eaten London accents that are down on their luck and have to be used by some one.
next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport.
Powerful irony in 'sport'...
how particularly superior he felt himself to be,
His chief disadvantage lay in athletics,
Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis.
School ruined his French and gave him a distaste for standard authors. His masters considered him idle, unreliable and superficially clever.
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.
A kind of vision or is this an example of procrastination?
he had formulated his first philosophy, a code to live by, which, as near as it can be named, was a sort of aristocratic egotism.
he was a slave to his own moods
a desire to “pass” as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world . . . with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.
If you still want to, you can go to school.” “Yes?” “To St. Regis’s in Connecticut.”
Monsignor Darcy’s house was an ancient, rambling structure set on a hill overlooking the river,
He and Amory took to each other at first sight—
He was resentful against all those in authority over him,
a lazy indifference toward his work,
He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.
“I’m in a superior class. You are, too.
Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would be the only boy entering that year from St. Regis’.
Amory decided to sit for a while on the front steps, so he bade them good night. The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.
He regretted the rule that would forbid freshmen to be outdoors after curfew, for he wanted to ramble through the shadowy scented lanes,
From the first he loved Princeton—its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds, and under it all the air of struggle that pervaded his class.
for Amory, the two Holidays, to whom he took an instant fancy. The Holidays were rumored twins, but really the dark-haired one, Kerry, was a year older than his blond brother, Burne.
Amory was far from contented. He missed the place he had won at St. Regis’, the being known and admired, yet Princeton stimulated him, and there were many things ahead calculated to arouse the Machiavelli latent in him, could he but insert a wedge.
“We’re the damned middle class, that’s what!” he complained to Kerry
said Kerry, as the excitement subsided, “you’re a literary genius. It’s up to you.” “I wonder”— Amory paused— “if I could be. I honestly think so sometimes.
I know I’m not a regular fellow, yet I loathe anybody else that isn’t. I can’t decide whether to cultivate my mind and be a great dramatist, or to thumb my nose at the Golden Treasury and be a Princeton slicker.”
I want to be admired, Kerry.”
So he found “Dorian Gray” and the “Mystic and Somber Dolores” and the “Belle Dame sans Merci”; for a month was keen on naught else.
he suddenly discovered that he had read nothing for years.
Tom D’Invilliers became at first an occasion rather than a friend.
Amory liked him for being clever
other freshmen, who called them “Doctor Johnson and Boswell.”
Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton,
unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.
Starlight and rain inspire the inner creator...Channel Van Gogh...
Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.
He liked knowing that Gothic architecture, with its upward trend, was peculiarly appropriate to universities, and the idea became personal to him.
in the German dash for Paris the whole affair failed either to thrill or interest him.
Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant. Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do,
Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome.
He lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather a mental thing,
“Isabelle,” he whispered. “You know I’m mad about you. You do give a darn about me.”
orgy of sociability culminated in a gigantic party at the Nassau Inn,
Amory ate little, having seized a chair where he could watch the sea and feel the rock of it.
Dick Humbird had, ever since freshman year, seemed to Amory a perfect type of aristocrat. He was slender but well-built—black curly hair, straight features, and rather a dark skin. Everything he said sounded intangibly appropriate.
He seemed the eternal example of what the upper class tries to be.
