There's little comfort
           in the wise.

    Rupert Brooke.

    Experience is the name so
           many people
          give to their mistakes.

    Oscar Wilde.

    To SIGOURNEY FAY

 
  BOOK ONE The Romantic Egotist

 
  CHAPTER 1 Amory, Son of
       Beatrice

    AMORY BLAINE
          inherited from his mother
               every trait,
           except the stray inexpressible few,
         that made him worth while.

    His father,
           an ineffectual,
         inarticulate man
               with a taste
             for Byron
                   and a habit of drowsing
               over the Encyclopedia Britannica,
           grew wealthy at thirty
               through the death
                   of two elder brothers,
         successful Chicago brokers,
           and in the first flush
               of feeling
             that the world was his,
         went to Bar Harbor and
              met Beatrice O'Hara.

    In consequence,
           Stephen Blaine
              handed down
                   to posterity his height of
                  just under six feet
                       and his tendency
                  to waver at crucial moments,
         these two abstractions
              appearing in his son Amory.

    For many years
         he hovered
               in the background
                   of his family's life,
           an unassertive figure
               with a face half-obliterated
             by lifeless,
         silky hair,
           continually occupied in
         "taking care"
            of his wife,
         continually harassed by the idea
             that he
                didn't and couldn't understand her.

    But Beatrice Blaine!

    There was a woman!

    Early pictures
          taken on her father's estate
               at Lake Geneva,
           Wisconsin,
         or in Rome
            at the Sacred Heart Convent-an
                     educational
                        extravagance
             that in her youth
                was only
                       for the daughters of the
                         exceptionally
                            wealthy-showed the exquisite delicacy
                               of her features,
           the consummate art
               and simplicity of her clothes.

    A brilliant education
         she had her -youth
              passed in renaissance glory,
           she was versed
               in the latest gossip
                   of the Older Roman Families;
        known by name
            as a fabulously wealthy
                    American girl
                   to Cardinal Vitori
                       and Queen Margherita
                     and more subtle celebrities
             that one
                must have had some culture
             even to have heard of.

    She learned in England
          to prefer whiskey and soda
               to wine,
           and her small talk
            was broadened in two senses
                  during a winter in Vienna.

    All in all Beatrice O'Hara
          absorbed the sort of education
         that will be
              quite impossible ever again;
        a tutelage
              measured by the number
                   of things
                  and people one
            could be contemptuous of and
                  charming about;
        a culture rich
               in all arts and traditions,
           barren of all ideas,
         in the last of
               those days
             when the great gardener
                  clipped the inferior roses
                      to produce one perfect bud.

    In her less important moments
         she returned to America,
           met Stephen Blaine and
              married him-this almost entirely
             because she
                was a little bit weary,
         a little bit sad.

    Her only child
        was carried
               through a tiresome season and
              brought into the world
                   on a spring
                       day in ninety-six.

    When Amory was five
         he was already
               a delightful companion for her.

    He was an auburn-haired boy,
           with great,
         handsome eyes which
             he would grow
                   up to in time,
           a facile imaginative mind
               and a taste
             for fancy dress.

    From his fourth
           to his tenth year
         he did the country
               with his mother
             in her father's private car,
           from Coronado,
         where his mother
            became so bored
             that she
                had a nervous breakdown
                       in a fashionable hotel,
           down to Mexico City,
         where she took a mild,
           almost epidemic consumption.

    This trouble pleased her,
           and later
             she made use of it
                   as an intrinsic part
                       of her atmosphere-especially
                  after several
                astounding bracers.

    So,
           while more
           or less fortunate
              little rich boys
            were defying governesses
                   on the beach
                 at Newport,
         or being spanked or tutored
              or read to from
         "Do and Dare,"
            or "Frank
               on the Mississippi," Amory