One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the "Smart Set" in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern — a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.

In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

"I feared so-you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist."

"I'm not sentimental-I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last-the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."