“Don’t know.
Better come up.”
He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then suddenly noticed that there were other people in the room.
“ ’Lo, Kerry.” He was most polite. “Ah, men of Princeton.” They seemed to be mostly friends, so he picked up the envelope marked
“Registrar’s Office,” and weighed it nervously.
“We have here quite a slip of paper.”
“Open it, Amory.”
“Just to be dramatic, I’ll let you know that if it’s blue, my name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my short career is over.”
He paused, and then saw for the first time Ferrenby’s eyes, wearing a hungry look and watching him eagerly.
Amory returned the gaze pointedly.
“Watch my face, gentlemen, for the primitive emotions.”
He tore it open and held the slip up to the light.
“Well?”
“Pink or blue?”
“Say what it is.”
“We’re all ears, Amory.”
“Smile or swear—or something.”
There was a pause ... a small crowd of seconds swept by... then he looked again and another crowd went on into time.
“Blue as the sky, gentlemen....”t
Aftermath
What Amory did that year from early September to late in the spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems scarcely worth recording.
He was, of course, immediately sorry for what he had lost.
His philosophy of success had tumbled down upon him, and he looked for the reasons.
“Your own laziness,” said Alec later.
“No—something deeper than that.
I’ve begun to feel that I was meant to lose this chance.”
“They’re rather off you at the club, you know; every man that doesn’t come through makes our crowd just so much weaker.”
“I hate that point of view.”
“Of course, with a little effort you could still stage a comeback.”
“No—I’m through—as far as ever being a power in college is concerned.”
“But, Amory, honestly, what makes me the angriest isn’t the fact that you won’t be chairman of the Prince and on the Senior Council, but just that you didn’t get down and pass that exam.”
“Not me,” said Amory slowly; “I’m mad at the concrete thing.
My own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck broke.”
“Your system broke, you mean.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, what are you going to do?
Get a better one quick, or just bum around for two more years as a has-been?”
“I don’t know yet ...”
“Oh, Amory, buck up!”
“Maybe.”
Amory’s point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the true one.
If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated, the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his earliest years:1.The fundamental Amory.2.Amory plus Beatrice.3.Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis.
Then St. Regis’ had pulled him to pieces and started him over again: 4.Amory plus St. Regis’.5.Amory plus St. Regis’ plus Princeton.
That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity.
The fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been nearly snowed under.
He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as his imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own success, he had listlessly, half- accidentally chucked the whole thing and become again:6.The fundamental Amory.
Financial
His father died quietly and inconspicuously at Thanksgiving.
The incongruity of death with either the beauties of Lake Geneva or with his mother’s dignified, reticent attitude diverted him, and he looked at the funeral with an amused tolerance.
He decided that burial was after all preferable to cremation, and he smiled at his old boyhood choice, slow oxidation in the top of a tree.