MihaElla ’s Reviews > The Collected Short Stories Of F. Scott Fitzgerald > Status Update

“It was a sad and sentimental wedding — an end to the fine, glamorous youth of a girl who was universally admired and loved. Perhaps to no onlooker there were its details symbolical of the end of a period, yet from the vantage point of a decade, certain things that happened are already powdered with yesterday’s ridiculousness, and even tinted with the lavender of the day before.”

She was in the world of being alone with a male, a world through which she had moved surely since she was eight years old. She did not plan; she merely let herself go, and the overwhelming life in her did the rest. It is only when youth is gone and experience has given us a sort of cheap courage that most of us realize how simple such things are.

One face emerged suddenly around a man’s upper arm,& Anthony was the object of the saddest & most tragic regard that had ever been directed upon him.It was a smile & not a smile-two big gray eyes with bright triangles of color underneath,& a mouth twisted into a universal sympathy that seemed to include both him & herself-yet withal, the expression not of a victim,but rather of the very demon of tender melancholy

Why should I kiss you? she demanded. I hardly know you, and besides, you’re engaged to somebody else

Oh, that! She doesn’t care

No, really!

You’re a good girl.

Well, I’m certainly not an idiot.

All right, go on being a good girl.

She stood up, but lingered a minute, very fresh and cool, and not upset at all.

I suppose this means you won’t give me a job? she asked pleasantly

Be wise, Marston. On your side there’s an obstinate prejudice; on mine there are forty million dollars. Don’t fool yourself. Let me repeat, Marston, that money is power. You were abroad so long that perhaps you’re inclined to forget that fact. Money made this country, built its great and glorious cities, created its industries, covered it with an iron network of railroads.

She hurried into a new spring evening dress of the frailest fairy blue. In the excitement of seeing herself in it, it seemed as if she had shed the old skin of winter and emerged a shining chrysalis with no stain; and going downstairs her feet fell softly just off the beat of the music from below. It was a tune from a play she had seen a week ago in New York, a tune with a future —

Josephine was an exquisite size for seventeen &of a beauty that was flowering marvelously day by day into something richer & warmer.People gasped nowadays,whereas a year ago they would merely have stared,& scarcely glanced at her a year before that.She was manifestly to be the spectacular débutante of Chicago next year,in spite of the fact that she was an egotist who played not for popularity but for individual men

What are you preparing to do,Hélène?he demanded kindly.What profession do the nuns teach you?
She shrugged her shoulders.
I shall marry,she said.A rich American if I can.That young man I just left for example — he is on the staff of the New York Herald Tribune
Reporters are not rich,he reproved her,& that one doesn’t look very promising
Oh, he is drunk now,said Hélène,but at times he is all one would desire.

It was Sunday again — the lovely, lazy perspective of the next twenty-four hours unrolled before him — every minute was something to be approached with lulling indirection, every moment held the germ of innumerable possibilities. Nothing was impossible — everything was just beginning. He poured himself another drink

“The psychoanalyst told Miles that he had a mother complex. In his first marriage he transferred his mother complex to his wife, you see — and then his sex turned to me. But when we married the thing repeated itself — he transferred his mother complex to me and all his libido turned toward this other woman.”
Joel knew that this probably wasn’t gibberish — yet it sounded like gibberish.”