Read The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald for Free Online

the conversation. Then she was shaking hands again and promising to come back a little later for some ice-cream, and smiling and smiling and being rather absurdly happy . . . she told herself that it was because Kieth was so delighted in showing her off.
    Then she and Kieth were strolling along a path, arm in arm, and he was informing her what an absolute jewel the Father Rector was.
    “Lois,” he broke off suddenly, “I want to tell you before we go any farther how much it means to me to have you come up here. I think it was—mighty sweet of you. I know what a gay time you’ve been having.”
    Lois gasped. She was not prepared for this. At first when she had conceived the plan of taking the hot journey down to Baltimore, staying the night with a friend and then coming out to see her brother, she had felt rather consciously virtuous, hoped he wouldn’t be priggish or resentful about her not having come before—but walking here with him under the trees seemed such a little thing, and surprisingly a happy thing.
    “Why, Kieth,” she said quickly, “you know I couldn’t have waited a day longer. I saw you when I was five, but of course I didn’t remember, and how could I have gone on without practically ever having seen my only brother?”
    “It was mighty sweet of you, Lois,” he repeated.
    Lois blushed—he
did
have personality.
    “I want you to tell me all about yourself,” he said after a pause. “Of course I have a general idea what you and mother did in Europe those fourteen years, and then we were all so worried, Lois, when you had pneumonia and couldn’t come down with mother—let’s see, that was two years ago—and then, well, I’ve seen your name in the papers, but it’s all been so unsatisfactory. I haven’t known you, Lois.”
    She found herself analyzing his personality as she analyzed the personality of every man she met. She wondered if the effect of—of intimacy that he gave was bred by his constant repetition of her name. He said it as if he loved the word, as if it had an inherent meaning to him.
    “Then you were at school,” he continued.
    “Yes, at Farmington. 3 Mother wanted me to go to a convent—but I didn’t want to.”
    She cast a side glance at him to see if he would resent this.
    But he only nodded slowly.
    “Had enough convents abroad, eh?”
    “Yes—and Kieth, convents are different there anyway. Here even in the nicest ones there are so many
common
girls.”
    He nodded again.
    “Yes,” he agreed, “I suppose there are, and I know how you feel about it. It grated on me here, at first, Lois, though I wouldn’t say that to any one but you; we’re rather sensitive, you and I, to things like this.”
    “You mean the men here?”
    “Yes, some of them of course were fine, the sort of men I’d always been thrown with, but there were others; a man named Regan, for instance—I hated the fellow, and now he’s about the best friend I have. A wonderful character, Lois; you’ll meet him later. Sort of man you’d like to have with you in a fight.”
    Lois was thinking that Kieth was the sort of man she’d like to have with
her
in a fight.
    “How did you—how did you first happen to do it?” she asked, rather shyly, “to come here, I mean. Of course mother told me the story about the Pullman car.”
    “Oh, that—” He looked rather annoyed.
    “Tell me that. I’d like to hear you tell it.”
    “Oh, it’s nothing, except what you probably know. It was evening and I’d been riding all day and thinking about—about a hundred things, Lois, and then suddenly I had a sense that some one was sitting across from me, felt that he’d been there for some time, and had a vague idea that he was another traveller. All at once he leaned over toward me and I heard a voice say: ‘I want you to be a priest, that’s what I want.’ Well, I jumped up and cried out, ‘Oh, my God, not that!’— made an idiot of myself before about twenty people; you see there wasn’t any