Amory, Son of Beatrice (Book One, Chapter 1)

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopædia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O'Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory.

But Beatrice! There was a woman! She had been educated in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent, and had learned there a culture rare in her country and her time; she had been a beauty and a wit, and she brought her son up as an equal and a companion. Amory went with her to Mexico, to Europe, to resorts and grand hotels; he was taught to order from French menus at ten, to read Fielding, to be delightful. She talked to him of everything, and often of her nerves; she drank; she had nervous breakdowns, which she spoke of as the most interesting events of her life. All in all Beatrice Blaine left Amory with a scorn of everyone not as clever as himself, and a sense of his own beautiful destiny.

Amory was an only child, and grew up among hotel suites and sleeping-cars and the conversation of his mother's friends. He was spoiled, charming, delicate, and very well informed about things a boy usually knows nothing of; he had had appendicitis as a child, and his mother had made of the operation a great romance. He had no idea of money, except that there would always be enough. And all the while there grew in him the conviction that he was a person apart, born for something special, whom the ordinary rules did not touch.

When he was thirteen he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, to go to school, and was horribly snubbed by the boys at first, but he triumphed; he wrote detective stories; he played football; and at a bob-party one winter evening, with a girl named Myra St. Claire, he kissed for the first time, and was immediately disgusted with himself, and with her, and fled from her in shame. For a long time he believed himself to be a very wicked boy.

At fifteen he was sent East to a boarding school, St. Regis', in Connecticut. He was the most unpopular boy in it. He was conceited and opinionated; he was bad at games and too clever in class. He dreamed of being a great figure, and found himself alone, and despised. But by the second year he had made himself a football star and a figure at school, and had learned to keep his superiority to himself. He discovered books: Kipling, Oscar Wilde, the poems of Rupert Brooke.

At St. Regis' he learned the first of his lessons in the way the world was made. He learned that the boys who were liked were not the clever ones but the ones who did as the others did, who were good at games and did not show off; and that a boy who talked about himself, however brilliantly, was hated. He spent a lonely year, writing letters to his mother and reading by himself. Then, in the second year, he made the football team, and played quarterback well enough to win a game, and was suddenly someone; and he took the lesson to heart. He began to divide the world into types and to study them: and he decided that the type to be was "the slicker" — the boy who was good-looking, well-dressed, clever enough but not too clever, who knew how to get on and how to keep his distance, and who used his brains to make himself liked.

His mother sent him to see an old friend of hers, Monsignor Thayer Darcy, a Catholic priest, a large, warm, worldly, delightful man who had once been in love with Beatrice; and Amory found in him the first person who understood him. Monsignor Darcy talked to him as an equal, of literature and religion and the mystery of himself; they were very alike, he said — both egotists, both romantics, both with a fatal sense of the theatrical; and Darcy remained, from then on, the one fixed point in Amory's shifting world.

In the autumn of 1913, Amory went to Princeton. He had chosen it, he said, because he thought of it as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic — "you know, like a spring day."