Horace rose and pulled on his coat.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” he answered. “I’ll be right back.”

  Ten minutes later as he headed down the street toward Skipper’s Gymnasium he felt a placid wonder quite unmixed with humor at what he was going to do. How he would have gaped at himself a year before! How everyone would have gaped! But when you opened your door at the rap of life you let in many things.

  The gymnasium was brightly lit and when his eyes became accustomed to the glare he found the meditative fat man seated on a pile of canvas mats smoking a big cigar.

  “Say,” began Horace directly, “were you in earnest last night when you said I could make money on my trapeze stunts?”

  “Why, yes,” said the fat man in surprise.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking it over and I believe I’d like to try it. I could work at night and on Saturday afternoons—and regularly if the pay is high enough.”

  The fat man looked at his watch. “Well,” he said, “Charlie Paulson’s the man to see. He’ll book you inside of four days, once he sees you work out. He won’t be in now, but I’ll get hold of him for tomorrow night.”

  The fat man was as good as his word. Charlie Paulson arrived next night and put in a wondrous hour watching the prodigy swoop through the air in amazing parabolas and on the night following he brought two large men with him who looked as though they had been born smoking black cigars and talking about money in low passionate voices. Then on the succeeding Saturday Horace Tarbox’s torso made its first professional appearance in a gymnastic exhibition at the Coleman Street Gardens. But though the audience numbered nearly five thousand people, Horace felt no nervousness.

  From his childhood he had read papers to audiences—learned that trick of detaching himself.

  “Marcia,” he said cheerfully later that same night, “I think we’re out of the woods. Paulson thinks he can get me an opening at the Hippodrome and that means an all winter engagement. The Hippodrome, you know, is a big —”

  “Yes, I believe I’ve heard of it,” interrupted Marcia, “but I want to know about this stunt you’re doing. It isn’t any spectacular suicide, is it?”

  “It’s nothing,” said Horace quietly. “But if you can think of any nicer way of a man killing himself than taking a risk for you why that’s the way I want to die.”

  Marcia reached up and wound both arms tightly round his neck.

  “Kiss me,” she whispered, “and call me ‘dear heart.’ I love to hear you say ‘dear heart.’ And bring me the book to read to-morrow. No more Sam Pepys, but something trick and trashy. I’ve been wild for something to do all day. I felt like writing letters, but I didn’t have anybody to write to.”

  “Write to me,” said Horace. “I’ll read them.”

  “I wish I could,” breathed Marcia. “If I knew words enough I could write you the longest love letter in the world—and never get tired.”

  But after two more months Marcia grew very tired indeed and for a row of nights it was a very anxious, weary-looking young athlete who walked out before the Hippodrome crowd. Then there were two days when his place was taken by a young man who wore pale blue instead of white and got very little applause. But after the two days Horace appeared again, and those who sat close to the stage remarked an expression of beatific happiness on that young acrobat’s face, even when he was twisting breathlessly in the air in the middle of his amazing and original shoulder swing. After that performance he laughed at the elevator man and dashed up the stairs to the flat five steps at a time—and then tiptoed very carefully into a quiet room.

  “Marcia,” he whispered.

  “Hello!” She smiled up at him wanly. “Horace, there’s something I want you to do. Look in my top bureau drawer and you’ll find a big stack of paper. It’s a book—sort of—Horace. I wrote it down in these last three months while I’ve been laid up. I wish you’d take it to that Peter Boyce Wendell, who put my letter in his paper. He could tell you whether it’d be a good book. I wrote it just the way I talk, just the way I wrote that letter to him. It’s just a story about a lot of things that happened to me. Will you take it to him, Horace?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  He leaned over the bed until his head was beside her on the pillow and began stroking back her yellow hair.

  “Dearest Marcia,” he said softly.

  “No,” she murmured, “call me what I told you to call me.”

  “Dear heart,” he whispered passionately—” dearest, dearest heart.”

  “What’ll we call her?”

  They rested a minute in happy drowsy content, while Horace considered.

  “We’ll call her Marcia Hume Tarbox,” he said at length.

  “Why the Hume?”

  “Because he’s the fellow who first introduced us.”

  “That so?” she murmured, sleepily surprised. “I thought his name was Moon.”

  Her eyes closed and after a moment the slow, lengthening surge of the bedclothes over her breast showed that she was asleep.

  Horace tiptoed over to the bureau and opening the top drawer found a heap of closely scrawled, lead-smeared pages. He looked at the first sheet:

  SANDRA PEPYS, SYNCOPATED

  BY MARCIA TARBOX

  He smiled. So Samuel Pepys had made an impression on her after all. He turned a page and began to read. His smile deepened—he read on. Half an hour passed and he became aware that Marcia had waked and was watching him from the bed.

  “Honey,” came in a whisper.

  “What, Marcia?”

  “Do you like it?”

  Horace coughed.

  “I seem to be reading on. It’s bright.”

  “Take it to Peter Boyce Wendell. Tell him you got the highest marks in Princeton once and that you ought to know when a book’s good. Tell him this one’s a world beater.”

  “All right, Marcia,” said Horace gently.

  Her eyes closed again and Horace crossing over kissed her forehead—stood there for a moment with a look of tender pity. Then he left the room.

  All that night the sprawly writing on the pages, the constant mistakes in spelling and grammar and the weird punctuation danced before his eyes. He woke several times in the night, each time full of a welling chaotic sympathy for this desire of Marcia’s soul to express itself in words. To him there was something infinitely pathetic about it, and for the first time in months he began to turn over in his mind his own half-forgotten dreams.

  He had meant to write a series of books, to popularize the new realism as Schopenhauer had popularized pessimism and William James pragmatism.

  But life hadn’t come that way. Life took hold of people and forced them into flying rings. He laughed to think of that rap at his door, the diaphanous shadow in Hume, Marcia’s threatened kiss.

  “And it’s still me,” he said aloud in wonder as he lay awake in the darkness. “I’m the man who sat in Berkeley with temerity to wonder if that rap would have had actual existence had my ear not been there to hear it. I’m still that man. I could be electrocuted for the crimes he committed.

  “Poor gauzy souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible. Marcia with her written book; I with my unwritten ones. Trying to choose our mediums and then taking what we get—and being glad.”

  V

  Sandra Pepys, Syncopated, with an introduction by Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, appeared serially in Jordan’s Magazine and came out in book form in March. From its first published installment it attracted attention far and wide. A trite enough subject—a girl from a small New Jersey town coming to New York to go on the stage—treated simply, with a peculiar vividness of phrasing and a haunting undertone of sadness in the very inadequacy of its vocabulary, it made an irresistible appeal.

  Peter Boyce Wendell, who happened at that time to be advocating the enrichment of the American language by the immediate adoption of expressive vernacular words, stood as its sponsor and thundered his endorsement over the placid bromides of the conventional reviewers.

  Marcia received three hundred dollars an installment for the serial publication, which came at an opportune time, for though Horace’s monthly salary at the Hippodrome was now more than Marcia’s had ever been, young Marcia was emitting shrill cries which they interpreted as a demand for country air. So early April found them installed in a bungalow in Westchester County with a place for a lawn, a place for a garage and a place for everything, including a sound-proof impregnable study in which Marcia faithfully promised Mr. Jordan she would shut herself up when her daughter’s demands began to be abated and compose immortally illiterate literature.

  “It’s not half bad,” thought Horace one night as he was on his way from the station to his house. He was considering several prospects that had opened up, a four months’ vaudeville offer in five figures, a chance to go back to Princeton in charge of all gymnasium work. Odd! He had once intended to go back there in charge of all philosophic work, and now he had not even been stirred by the arrival in New York of Anton Laurier, his old idol.

  The gravel crunched raucously under his heel. He saw the lights of his sitting room gleaming and noticed a big car standing in the drive. Probably Mr. Jordan again, come to persuade Marcia to settle down to work.

  She had heard the sound of his approach and her form was silhouetted against the lighted door as she came out to meet him.

  “There’s some Frenchman here,” she whispered nervously. “I can’t pronounce his name, but he sounds awful deep. You’ll have to jaw with him.”

  “What Frenchman?”

  “You can’t prove it by me. He drove up an hour ago with Mr. Jordan and said he wanted to meet Sandra Pepys, and all that sort of thing.”

  Two men rose from chairs as they went inside.

  “Hello, Tarbox,” said Jordan. “I’ve just been bringing together two celebrities. M’sieur Laurier, let me present Mr. Tarbox, Mrs. Tarbox’s husband.”

  “Not Anton Laurier!”

  “But, yes. I must come. I have to come. I have read the book of Madame and I have been charmed “—he fumbled in his pocket—“ah, I have read of you too. In this newspaper which I read to-day it has your name.”

  He finally produced a clipping from a magazine.

  “Read it!” he said eagerly. “It has about you too.”

  Horace’s eye skipped down the page.

  “A distinct contribution to American dialect literature,” it said. “No attempt at literary tone; the book derives its very quality from this fact, as did Huckleberry Finn.”

  Horace’s eyes caught a passage lower down; he became suddenly aghast—read on hurriedly.

  “Marcia Tarbox’s connection with the stage is not only as a spectator but as the wife of a performer. She was married last year to Horace Tarbox, who every evening delights the children at the Hippodrome with his wondrous flying-ring performance. It is said that the young couple have dubbed themselves Head and Shoulders, referring doubtless to the fact that Mrs. Tarbox supplies the literary and mental qualities while the supple and agile shoulders of her husband contribute their share to the family fortunes.

  “Mrs. Tarbox seems to merit that much-abused title—’prodigy.’ Only twenty—”

  Horace stopped reading and with a very odd expression in his eyes gazed intently at Anton Laurier.

  “I want to advise you —“ he began hoarsely.

  “What?”

  “About raps. Don’t answer them! Let them alone—have a padded door.”

  Myra appeared almost concurrently with the publication of This Side of Paradise, on March 20, 1920, and earned $400 for the author.

  While not a favorite of Fitzgerald’s, the story has been brought to the screen twice. The first time was a mere six months after the story appeared in the Post. “Husband Hunters,” as the silent film was titled, was released by Fox on September 19, 1920 and directed by Howard Mitchell.

  On April 22, 1985, PBS’ American Playhouse presented an adaptation entitled “Under the Biltmore Clock” starring Sean Young.

  Myra Meets His Family

  Probably every boy who has attended an Eastern college in the last ten years has met Myra half a dozen times, for the Myras live on the Eastern colleges, as kittens live on warm milk. When Myra is young, seventeen or so, they call her a “wonderful kid”; in her prime—say, at nineteen—she is tendered the subtle compliment of being referred to by her name alone; and after that she is a “prom trotter” or “the famous coast-to-coast Myra.”

  You can see her practically any winter afternoon if you stroll through the Biltmore lobby. She will be standing in a group of sophomores just in from Princeton or New Haven, trying to decide whether to dance away the mellow hours at the Club de Vingt or the Plaza Red Room. Afterward one of the sophomores will take her to the theater and ask her down to the February prom—and then dive for a taxi to catch the last train hack to college.

  Invariably she has a somnolent mother sharing a suite with her on one of the floors above.

  When Myra is about twenty-four she thinks over all the nice boys she might have married at one time or other, sighs a little and does the best she can. But no remarks, please! She has given her youth to you; she has blown fragrantly through many ballrooms to the tender tribute of many eyes; she has roused strange surges of romance in a hundred pagan young breasts; and who shall say she hasn’t counted?

  The particular Myra whom this story concerns will have to have a paragraph of history. I will get it over with as swiftly as possible.

  When she was sixteen she lived in a big house in Cleveland and attended Derby School in Connecticut, and it was while she was still there that she started going to prep-school dances and college proms. She decided to spend the war at Smith College, but in January of her freshman year falling violently in love with a young infantry officer she failed all her midyear examinations and retired to Cleveland in disgrace. The young infantry officer arrived about a week later.

  Just as she had about decided that she didn’t love him after all he was ordered abroad, and in a great revival of sentiment she rushed down to the port of embarkation with her mother to bid him good-by. She wrote him daily for two months, and then weekly for two months, and then once more. This last letter he never got, for a machine-gun bullet ripped through his head one rainy July morning. Perhaps this was just as well, for the letter informed him that it had all been a mistake, and that something told her they would never be happy together, and so on.

  The “something” wore boots and silver wings and was tall and dark. Myra was quite sure that it was the real thing at last, but as an engine went through his chest at Kelly Field in mid-August she never had a chance to find out.

  Instead she came East again, a little slimmer, with a becoming pallor and new shadows under her eyes, and throughout armistice year she left the ends of cigarettes all over New York on little china trays marked “Midnight Frolic” and “Coconut Grove” and “Palais Royal.” She was twenty-one now, and Cleveland people said that her mother ought to take her back home—that New York was spoiling her.

  You will have to do your best with that. The story should have started long ago.

  It was an afternoon in September when she broke a theater date in order to have tea with young Mrs. Arthur Elkins, once her roommate at school.

  “I wish,” began Myra as they sat down exquisitely, “that I’d been a señorita or a mademoiselle or something. Good grief! What is there to do over here once you’re out, except marry and retire!”

  Lilah Elkins had seen this form of ennui before.

  “Nothing,” she replied coolly; “do it.”

  “I can’t seem to get interested, Lilah,” said Myra, bending forward earnestly. “I’ve played round so much that even while I’m kissing the man I just wonder how soon I’ll get tired of him. I never get carried away like I used to.”

  “How old are you, Myra?”

  “Twenty-one last spring.”

  “Well,” said Lilah complacently, “take it from me don’t get married unless you’re absolutely through playing round. It means giving up an awful lot, you know.”

  “Through! I’m sick and tired of my whole pointless existence. Funny, Lilah, but I do feel ancient. Up at New Haven last spring men danced with me that seemed like little boys—and once I overheard a girl say in the dressing room, `There’s Myra Harper! She’s been coming up here for eight years.’ Of course she was about three years off, but it did give me the calendar blues.”

  “You and I went to our first prom when we were sixteen —five years ago.”

  “Heavens!” sighed Myra. “And now some men are afraid of me. Isn’t that odd? Some of the nicest boys. One man dropped me like a hotcake after coming down from Morristown for three straight week-ends. Some kind friend told him I was husband hunting this year, and he was afraid of getting in too deep.”

  “Well, you are husband hunting, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose so—after a fashion.” Myra paused and looked about her rather cautiously. “Have you ever met Knowleton Whitney? You know what a wiz he is on looks, and his father’s worth a fortune, they say. Well, I noticed that the first time he met me he started when he heard my name and fought shy—and, Lilah darling, I’m not so ancient and homely as all that, am I?”

  “You certainly are not!” laughed Lilah. “And here’s my advice: Pick out the best thing in sight—the man who has all the mental, physical, social and financial qualities you want, and then go after him hammer and tongs—the way we used to. After you’ve got him don’t say to yourself ‘Well, he can’t sing like Billy,’ or ‘I wish he played better golf.’ You can’t have everything. Shut your eyes and turn off your sense of humor, and then after you’re married it’ll he very different and you’ll he mighty glad.”

  “Yes,” said Myra absently; “I’ve had that advice before.”

  “Drifting into romance is easy when you’re eighteen,” continued Lilah emphatically; “but after five years of it your capacity for it simply burns out.”