Book One (Chapters I–III)

I. Anthony Patch

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!" — yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage.

He was the grandson of Adam J. Patch, an old man who had gone to the Civil War as a private, come home a major, charged into Wall Street, and amassed some seventy-five million dollars. Then, at fifty-seven, after a severe attack of sclerosis, he had decided to devote the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world. He became a reformer among reformers: he levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines and Sunday theatres. The newspapers called him "Cross Patch." He lived in a great house at Tarrytown, on the Hudson, with his secretary, Edward Shuttleworth, a former gambler and saloon-keeper whom he had reformed, and from there he waged war on sin, and waited for death.

His only son, Adam Ulysses Patch, had married a Boston lady, had gone about the world in a dashing style, and had died in a hotel at Lucerne, when Anthony was eleven; Anthony's mother had died years before. The boy was brought up by his grandfather, and grew into a dark, thin, moderately handsome young man, with a horror of his own weakness. He was always afraid — afraid of the dark, of death, of being laughed at — and he covered his fear with a manner of tired, polished amusement. He went to Harvard, where he was thought clever and aloof; he went to Rome, and there he dallied with architecture and painting and the violin, and decided that he would one day write a history of the Renaissance popes. He had, he felt, done nothing whatever and yet was entitled to a great deal.

Now he was back in New York, living on the income of a small inheritance from his mother — some seven thousand a year — in a pleasant apartment on Fifty-second Street, with a magnificent bathroom of which he was very proud, and an English servant named Bounds. He meant to begin his book soon. He did not begin it. He read, and dressed, and dined, and talked, and walked down Fifth Avenue in the late afternoon, and felt the city flowing past him.

His mornings belonged to his bath. He lay in it a long time and thought of himself: of the man he would be, the books he would write, the famous people he would know; and then he dressed with great care, and Bounds brought him his breakfast, and the day stretched out before him, empty and agreeable. He sometimes took out a girl named Geraldine Burke, an usher at a vaudeville theatre, small and pretty and not at all clever, who amused him and asked nothing of him; it was, he told himself, a thing of no importance.

He had two close friends. Maury Noble, his classmate at Harvard, was a large, lazy, sleek young man with the eyes of a cat, who looked down on the world from a great height and found it very amusing; he had decided long ago that nothing mattered, and lived beautifully on that decision. Richard Caramel — Dick — was short and fair and earnest, with one eye of startling yellow; he was writing a novel, The Demon Lover, and believed in work, and in literature, and in himself. The three of them met for long dinners, and talked about love and money and art, and about what they were going to do with their lives.

Anthony believed, in his heart, that it did not much matter what he did, because nothing was worth doing; but he did not say so, because he was afraid that this was only an excuse for doing nothing. Maury said it for him. Dick, who was always busy, thought them both wrong, and told them so, and they smiled at him.

Once a month or so Anthony went out to Tarrytown to see his grandfather, who was going to leave him an enormous fortune. The old man, withered and sharp, asked him what he was doing with himself. Anthony said he was going to write a history of the Middle Ages. The old man was not impressed. "You ought to write on something useful," he said. "Go into business. Do something." Anthony was polite, and came away depressed. He was waiting, though he would not have put it so, for his grandfather to die.

Fitzgerald here inserts a short fantasy, written as a scene in a play, called "A Flash-Back in Paradise." Beauty, who is born again every hundred years, is told by a Voice that she is to be sent down to earth once more, this time to America, in the new age — and that she will be not a great lady or a queen, but something new: "a ragtime kid," "a flapper," "a jazz-baby." She will be loved by many, and will not know her own worth, and will be sought for her body and her face. She asks how long she will stay. Not long, says the Voice: fifteen years or so. And Beauty goes.

One day Dick Caramel told Anthony that his cousin was in town: Gloria Gilbert, from Kansas City, who was staying with her parents at the Plaza Hotel. She was, Dick said, very good-looking, and very much sought after. Anthony said he would like to meet her.

II. Portrait of a Siren

Gloria's parents were dull. Her father, Russel Gilbert, had made a modest fortune in the celluloid business in the Middle West and had come East to live in hotels; her mother was a vague, kindly woman who had taken up a new religion called Bilphism, which taught that the soul passed through many bodies, and who talked about it to anyone who would listen. Gloria treated them both with an indifferent, careless affection.

Anthony called, and met the mother, and was bored, and then Gloria came in. She was twenty-two. She was dazzling — alight; she was fair, with a mass of golden-brown hair, and a mouth that was like a small flower; she was sunburned from a summer at the seashore, and she was chewing gum. She talked about herself — about her sunburn, about her legs, about the people she knew, about how she hated the idea of being old — frankly and without the slightest embarrassment, as if she were the only subject in the world worth discussing. She had, Anthony felt, a sort of perfect, insolent selfishness that was itself a kind of charm. He was fascinated. When he left, he could not remember what he had said.

Anthony tried to talk to her of books, and she yawned; he tried to be witty, and she watched him as if he were a performance; he made her laugh once, and felt he had won a battle. She told him that she found most men dull. She asked him what he did, and when he said that he did nothing, she said that she thought that was the only thing a gentleman could do — and he could not tell if she was mocking him.

He saw her again, at tea, at dances, at supper in the cabarets; she was always surrounded. There were half a dozen men in love with her, and she treated them all with the same lazy, absent friendliness. One of them was Joseph Bloeckman, a stout, prosperous, carefully dressed man in his thirties, an immigrant's son who had risen from a travelling peanut-vendor to be vice-president of a moving-picture company, Films Par Excellence; Anthony and Maury looked down on him as an outsider, and Gloria let him take her to dinner. She had a friend, Muriel Kane, a dark girl who imitated vamps in the moving pictures and said everything was "dandy."

Anthony could not get her out of his mind. He would call at the Plaza, and she would be out; he would wait, and she would come in late with another man. Then one evening, in his apartment, alone with her by the fire, he kissed her — and she let him, coolly, as if it were nothing much; and then she said she must go home. The next time he saw her she was distant, and talked of another man, and he went home in torment. He was jealous, miserable, sleepless. He told himself that he did not love her, that she was a spoiled, empty girl, that he would not see her again. He saw her the next day.

One night in that unhappy time, alone at his window, he heard from somewhere in the dark below a woman's laughter, high and shrill and endless, that went on and on; and it filled him with a horror he could not explain, as if it were the laughter of the whole city at everything he valued. He could not sleep for it.

Gloria herself was harder to know. She did not read; she did not care about ideas; she lived entirely in the present, for her own pleasure; she meant, she said, never to do anything she did not want to do, and never to be bored. She did not want to be married, and she did not want to have children — she thought of babies with a mild horror, and of housework with a great one. "I want to just be lazy," she said, "and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe." She kept a diary, in which she wrote down the names of the men she had kissed.

To Anthony, who had believed that he expected nothing of the world, she was a revelation: she seemed to him to have the courage of her own selfishness, as he had not. Once, when he reproached her for kissing other men, she answered that a kiss was nothing — that she kissed men she liked, as she might smile at them, and that if he wanted more of her than that he must win it. He went away humiliated, and came back.

III. The Connoisseur of Kisses

Through that winter Anthony's love grew from a fever into an obsession. Dick Caramel finished The Demon Lover, which was accepted by a publisher; Maury watched with an amused smile. Gloria was sometimes tender, and sometimes indifferent, and once, when he pressed her, she was brutal. She went to Florida with her mother; she came back.

For weeks she would not see him alone. He walked the streets at night, past the Plaza, looking up at her windows; he went to parties in the hope of catching sight of her, and saw her dancing with other men, and went home and could not sleep. He was ashamed of himself, and could not stop.

There came an evening when he told her he loved her — when everything he had kept back broke through. And to his astonishment, she said that she loved him too. It was, the narrator says, the ecstasy of youth: they talked for hours, and kissed, and planned. She had kissed many men, she told him, but there would be no one else now. Anthony felt that he had won the one beautiful thing in the world.

They told their families. Mrs Gilbert was delighted; Mr Gilbert, who knew that Anthony was the heir of Adam Patch, was satisfied. Anthony went out to Tarrytown and told his grandfather, who was not displeased: marriage, the old man thought, might steady the boy; he told Anthony that now, surely, he would go to work. Anthony said that he would, perhaps, after the wedding.

But there were warnings, if they had looked for them. One evening Gloria told Anthony coolly that she had gone out to supper with Bloeckman; and when he raged, she simply stopped speaking to him for a week. And Anthony noticed for the first time that she was utterly without a sense of money — that she would order a dinner for six dollars as easily as for sixty cents, and leave a cab waiting for an hour. He thought it charming. They were very young, and very beautiful, and very much in love, and in a few months they would be married; the world was theirs.