The Popular Girl
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, the quintessential tale of the decadence and overindulgence of the Jazz Age. Born into an upper middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised in New York. After dropping out of Princeton University in 1917 to join the Army, he was stationed in Alabama, where he met wealthy socialite Zelda Sayre. It was only after he achieved moderate success with his debut novel This Side of Paradise that Zelda agreed to marry him. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, propelled him to literary stardom, the volatile nature of which inspired his best-known work The Great Gatsby. Though it met with mixed reviews in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, The Great Gatsby is now considered by some literary scholars to be the “Great American Novel.” Haunted by alcoholism, declining popularity, and financial difficulties well into the 1930s, Fitzgerald died in 1940. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1941.
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The Popular Girl - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Popular Girl
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Start Publishing LLC
Copyright © 2020 by Start Publishing LLC
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
First Start Publishing eBook edition.
Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-952438-37-0
Table of Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
I
Along about half-past ten every Saturday night Yanci Bowman eluded her partner by some graceful subterfuge and from the dancing floor went to point of vantage overlooking the country-club bar. When she saw her father she would either beckon to him, if he chanced to be looking in her direction, or else she would dispatch a waiter to call attention to her impendent presence. If it were no later than half past ten—that is, if he had had no more than an hour of synthetic gin rickeys—he would get up from his chair and suffer himself to be persuaded into the ballroom.
Ballroom,
for want of a better word. It was that room, filled by day with wicker furniture, which was always connotated in the phrase Let’s go in and dance.
It was referred to as inside
or downstairs.
It was that nameless chamber wherein occur the principal transactions of all the country clubs in America.
Yanci knew that if she could keep her father there for an hour, talking, watching her dance, or even on rare occasions dancing himself, she could safely release him at the end of that time. In the period that would elapse before midnight ended the dance he could scarcely become sufficiently stimulated to annoy anyone.
All this entailed considerable exertion on Yanci’s part, and it was less for her father’s sake than for her own that she went through with it. Several rather unpleasant experiences were scattered through this past summer. One night when she had been detained by the impassioned and impossible-to-interrupt speech of a young man from Chicago her father had appeared swaying gently in the ballroom doorway; in his ruddy handsome face two faded blue eyes were squinted half shut as he tried to focus them on the dancers, and he was obviously preparing to offer himself to the first dowager who caught his eye. He was ludicrously injured when Yanci insisted upon an immediate withdrawal.
After that night Yanci went through her Fabian maneuver to the minute.
Yanci and her father were the handsomest two people in the Middle Western city where they lived. Tom Bowman’s complexion was hearty from twenty years spent in the service of good whisky and bad golf. He kept an office downtown, where he was thought to transact some vague real-estate business; but in point of fact his chief concern in life was the exhibition of a handsome profile and an easy well-bred manner at the country club, where he had spent the greater part of the ten years that had elapsed since his wife’s death.
Yanci was twenty, with a vague die-away manner which was partly the setting for her languid disposition and partly the effect of a visit she had paid to some Eastern relatives at an impressionable age. She was intelligent, in a flitting way, a romantic under the moon and unable to decide whether to marry for sentiment or for comfort, the latter of these two abstractions being well enough personified by one of the most ardent among her admirers. Meanwhile she kept house, not without efficiency, for her father, and tried in a placid unruffled tempo to regulate his constant tippling to the sober side of inebriety.
She admired her father. She admired him for his fine appearance and for his charming manner. He had never quite lost the air of having been a popular Bones man at Yale. This charm of his was a standard by which her susceptible temperament unconsciously judged the men she knew. Nevertheless, father and daughter were far from that sentimental family relationship which is a stock plant in fiction, but in life usually exists in the mind of only the older party to it. Yanci Bowman had decided to leave her home by marriage within the year. She was heartily bored.
Scott Kimblerly, who saw her for the first time this November evening at the country club, agreed with the lady whose house guest he was that Yanci was an exquisite little beauty. With a sort of conscious sensuality surprising in such a young man—Scott was only twenty-five—he avoided an introduction that he might watch her undisturbed for a fanciful hour, and sip the pleasure