The Lay Anthony: A Romance

“ ... if in passing from this deceitful world into true life love is not forgotten,... I know that among the most joyous souls of the third heaven my Fiametta sees my pain. Pray her, if the sweet draught of Lethe has not robbed me of her,... to obtain my ascent to her. ”
—Giovanni Boccaccio
CONTENTS

NOT for the honor of winning the Vanderbilt Cup, nor for the glory of pitching a major league baseball team into the world's championship, would Tony Ball have admitted to the familiar and derisive group in the drugstore that he was—in the exact, physical aspect of the word—pure. Secretly, and in an entirely natural and healthy manner, he was ashamed of his innocence. He carefully concealed it in an elaborate assumption of wide worldly knowledge and experience, in an attitude of cynical comprehension, and indifference toward girls .
But he might have spared himself the effort, the fictions, of his pose—had he proclaimed his ignorance aloud from the brilliantly lighted entrance to the drugstore no one who knew him in the midweek, night throng on Ellerton's main street would have credited Anthony with anything beyond a thin and surprising joke. He was, at twenty, the absolute, adventurous opposite of any conscious or cloistered virtue: the careless carriage of his big, loose frame; his frank, smiling grey eyes and ample mouth; his very, drawling voice—all marked him for a loiterer in the pleasant and sunny places of life, indifferent to the rigors of a mental or moral discipline.
The accumulated facts of his existence fully bore this out: the number of schools from which, playing superlative baseball, he had been still obliged to leave, carrying with him the cordial good will of master and fellow, for an unconquerable, irresponsible laxity; the number and variety of occupations that had claimed him in the past three years, every one of which at their inception certain, he felt confident, to carry him beyond all dreams and necessity of avarice; and every one, in his rapidly diminishing interest, attention, or because of persistent, adverse conditions over which, he asseverated, he had no control, turning into a fallow field, a disastrous venture; and, conclusively, the group of familiars, the easy companions of idle hours, to which he had gravitated.