Chapter 3

BOOK ONE
The Romantic Egotist

CHAPTER 3
The Egotist Considers

"OUCH! Let me go!"
He dropped his arms to his sides. "What's the matter?"
"Your shirt studit hurt melook!" She was looking down at her neck, where a little blue spot about the size of a pea marred its pallor.
"Oh, Isabelle," he reproached himself, "I'm a goopher. Really, I'm sorryI shouldn't have held you so close." She looked up impatiently.
"Oh, Amory, of course you couldn't help it, and it didn't hurt much; but what are we going to do about it?" "Do about it?" he asked. "Ohthat spot; it'll disappear in a second."
"It isn't," she said, after a moment of concentrated gazing, "it's still thereand it looks like Old Nickoh, Amory, what'll we do! It's just the height of your shoulder." "Massage it," he suggested, repressing the faintest inclination to laugh.
She rubbed it delicately with the tips of her fingers, and then a tear gathered in the corner of her eye, and slid down her cheek. "Oh, Amory," she said despairingly, lifting up a most pathetic face, "I'll just make my whole neck flame if I rub it. What'll I do?"
A quotation sailed into his head and he couldn't resist repeating it aloud.

"All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this little hand."

She looked up and the sparkle of the tear in her eye was like ice.
"You're not very sympathetic." Amory mistook her meaning.
"Isabelle, darling, I think it'll" "Don't touch me!" she cried. "Haven't I enough on my mind and you stand there and laugh!"
Then he slipped again.
"Well, it is funny, Isabelle, and we were talking the other day about a sense of humor being"
She was looking at him with something that was not a smile, rather the faint, mirthless echo of a smile, in the corners of her mouth.
"Oh, shut up!" she cried suddenly, and fled down the hallway toward her room. Amory stood there, covered with remorseful confusion.
"Damn!"
When Isabelle reappeared she had thrown a light wrap about her shoulders, and they descended the stairs in a silence that endured through dinner.
"Isabelle," he began rather testily, as they arranged themselves in the car, bound for a dance at the Greenwich Country Club, "you're angry, and I'll be, too, in a minute. Let's kiss and make up."
Isabelle considered glumly.
"I hate to be laughed at," she said finally. "I won't laugh any more. I'm not laughing now, am I?" "You did."
"Oh, don't be so darned feminine." Her lips curled slightly.
"I'll be anything I want."
Amory kept his temper with difficulty. He became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then he knew he could leave in the morning and not care. On the contrary, if he didn't kiss her, it would worry him.... It would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror.