... Oh it’s so hard to write you what I really feel when I
think about you so much; you’ve gotten to mean to me a dream that
I can’t put on paper any more. Your last letter came and it was
wonderful! I read it over about six times, especially the last
part, but I do wish, sometimes, you’d be more frank and tell me
what you really do think of me, yet your last letter was too good
to be true, and I can hardly wait until June! Be sure and be able
to come to the prom. It’ll be fine, I think, and I want to bring
you just at the end of a wonderful year. I often think over what
you said on that night and wonder how much you meant. If it were
anyone but you—but you see I thought you were fickle the first
time I saw you and you are so popular and everthing that I can’t
imagine you really liking me best.
Oh, Isabelle, dear—it’s a wonderful night. Somebody is playing
“Love Moon” on a mandolin far across the campus, and the music
seems to bring you into the window. Now he’s playing “Good-by,
Boys, I’m Through,” and how well it suits me. For I am through
with everything. I have decided never to take a cocktail again,
and I know I’ll never again fall in love—I couldn’t—you’ve been
too much a part of my days and nights to ever let me think of
another girl. I meet them all the time and they don’t interest me.
I’m not pretending to be blasé, because it’s not that. It’s just
that I’m in love. Oh, dearest Isabelle (somehow I can’t call you
just Isabelle, and I’m afraid I’ll come out with the “dearest”
before your family this June), you’ve got to come to the prom,
and then I’ll come up to your house for a day and everything’ll be
perfect....
And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them infinitely charming, infinitely new.
June came and the days grew so hot and lazy that they could not worry even about exams, but spent dreamy evenings on the court of Cottage, talking of long subjects until the sweep of country toward Stony Brook became a blue haze and the lilacs were white around tennis-courts, and words gave way to silent cigarettes.... Then down deserted Prospect and along McCosh with song everywhere around them, up to the hot joviality of Nassau Street.
Tom D’Invilliers and Amory walked late in those days. A gambling fever swept through the sophomore class and they bent over the bones till three o’clock many a sultry night. After one session they came out of Sloane’s room to find the dew fallen and the stars old in the sky.
“Let’s borrow bicycles and take a ride,” Amory suggested.
“All right. I’m not a bit tired and this is almost the last night of the year, really, because the prom stuff starts Monday.”
They found two unlocked bicycles in Holder Court and rode out about half-past three along the Lawrenceville Road.
“What are you going to do this summer, Amory?”
“Don’t ask me—same old things, I suppose. A month or two in Lake Geneva—I’m counting on you to be there in July, you know—then there’ll be Minneapolis, and that means hundreds of summer hops, parlor-snaking, getting bored—But oh, Tom,” he added suddenly, “hasn’t this year been slick!”