The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald Page A

“Well, Omar Khayyam, 10 here I am beside you singing in the wilderness.”
    Horace stared at her dazedly. The momentary suspicion came to him that she existed there only as a phantom of his imagination. Women didn’t come into men’s rooms and sink into men’s Humes. Women brought laundry and took your seat in the street-car and married you later on when you were old enough to know fetters.
    This woman had clearly materialized out of Hume. The very froth of her brown gauzy dress was an emanation from Hume’s leather arm there! If he looked long enough he would see Hume right through her and then he would be alone again in the room. He passed his fist across his eyes. He really must take up those trapeze exercises again.
    “For Pete’s sake, don’t look so critical!” objected the emanation pleasantly. “I feel as if you were going to wish me away with that patent dome of yours. And then there wouldn’t be anything left of me except my shadow in your eyes.”
    Horace coughed. Coughing was one of his two gestures. When he talked you forgot he had a body at all. It was like hearing a phonograph record by a singer who had been dead a long time.
    “What do you want?” he asked.
    “I want them letters,” whined Marcia melodramatically—“them letters of mine you bought from my grandsire in 1881.”
    Horace considered.
    “I haven’t got your letters,” he said evenly. “I am only seventeen years old. My father was not born until March 3, 1879. You evidently have me confused with some one else.”
    “You’re only seventeen?” repeated Marcia suspiciously.
    “Only seventeen.”
    “I knew a girl,” said Marcia reminiscently, “who went on the ten-twenty-thirty 11 when she was sixteen. She was so stuck on herself that she could never say ‘sixteen’ without putting the ‘only’ before it. We got to calling her ‘Only Jessie.’ And she’s just where she was when she started—only worse. ‘Only’ is a bad habit, Omar—it sounds like an alibi.”
    “My name is not Omar.”
    “I know,” agreed Marcia, nodding—“your name’s Horace. I just call you Omar because you remind me of a smoked cigarette.”
    “And I haven’t your letters. I doubt if I’ve ever met your grandfather. In fact, I think it very improbable that you yourself were alive in 1881.”
    Marcia stared at him in wonder.
    “Me—1881? Why sure! I was second-line stuff when the Florodora Sextette 12 was still in the convent. I was the original nurse to Mrs. Sol Smith’s 13 Juliette. Why, Omar, I was a canteen singer during the War of 1812.”
    Horace’s mind made a sudden successful leap, and he grinned.
    “Did Charlie Moon put you up to this?”
    Marcia regarded him inscrutably.
    “Who’s Charlie Moon?”
    “Small—wide nostrils—big ears.”
    She grew several inches and sniffed.
    “I’m not in the habit of noticing my friends’ nostrils.”
    “Then it was Charlie?”
    Marcia bit her lip—and then yawned.
    “Oh, let’s change the subject, Omar. I’ll pull a snore in this chair in a minute.”
    “Yes,” replied Horace gravely, “Hume has often been considered soporific.”
    “Who’s your friend—and will he die?”
    Then of a sudden Horace Tarbox rose slenderly and began to pace the room with his hands in his pockets. This was his other gesture.
    “I don’t care for this,” he said as if he were talking to himself—“at all. Not that I mind your being here—I don’t. You’re quite a pretty little thing, but I don’t like Charlie Moon’s sending you up here. Am I a laboratory experiment on which the janitors as well as the chemists can make experiments? Is my intellectual development humorous in any way? Do I look like the pictures of the little Boston boy in the comic magazines? 14 Has that callow ass, Moon, with his eternal tales about his week in Paris, any right to——”
    “No,” interrupted Marcia emphatically. “And you’re a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me.”
    Horace stopped quickly in