"and I know that girl's as good as gold. I can tell."

They wandered on, mixing in the Broadway crowd, dreaming on the music
that eddied out of the cafes. New faces flashed on and off like
myriad lights, pale or rouged faces, tired, yet sustained by a weary
excitement. Amory watched them in fascination. He was planning his life.
He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and
cafe, wearing a dress-suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping
away the dull hours of the forenoon.

"Yes, _sir_, I'd marry that girl to-night!"

*****

HEROIC IN GENERAL TONE

October of his second and last year at St. Regis' was a high point in
Amory's memory. The game with Groton was played from three of a snappy,
exhilarating afternoon far into the crisp autumnal twilight, and Amory
at quarter-back, exhorting in wild despair, making impossible tackles,
calling signals in a voice that had diminished to a hoarse, furious
whisper, yet found time to revel in the blood-stained bandage around his
head, and the straining, glorious heroism of plunging, crashing bodies
and aching limbs. For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of the
November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, one with the sea-rover on
the prow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and Horatius, Sir Nigel and
Ted Coy, scraped and stripped into trim and then flung by his own will
into the breach, beating back the tide, hearing from afar the thunder of
cheers... finally bruised and weary, but still elusive, circling an end,
twisting, changing pace, straight-arming... falling behind the Groton
goal with two men on his legs, in the only touchdown of the game.

*****

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SLICKER

From the scoffing superiority of sixth-form year and success Amory
looked back with cynical wonder on his status of the year before. He was
changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus
Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis--these had been his ingredients
when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick
enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting
eyes of a boarding-school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled
Beatrice out of him, and begun to lay down new and more conventional
planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were
unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself
changed. Those qualities for which he ha