The Last Gentleman

goes to dances.”
    â€œYou’re in a fair way to do it.”
    â€œI love to dance.”
    â€œThen work harder at it. You’re lazy.”
    â€œYou know what I mean. I mean dancing cheek to cheek. I want to be broken in on.”
    â€œThey don’t dance like that now.”
    â€œI want to have beaus.”
    â€œYou can have beaus in Tesuque or in Salamanca and not ruin your mind while you do it”
    â€œI want to be Tri Delt.”
    â€œGood God!”
    â€œI want to go to dances and get a tremendous rush. That’s what my grandmother used to say: I went to such and such a dance and got a tremendous rush. Did you know my grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer?”
    â€œYes, you told me.”
    â€œI want to talk the foolishness the girls and boys at home talk.”
    â€œYou’re on your way.”
    â€œI want to go to school. I want to buy new textbooks and a binder full of fresh paper and hold my books in my arms and walk across the campus. And wear a sweater.”
    â€œVery well.”
    â€œI want to go to the Sugar Bowl.”
    â€œChrist.”
    â€œBut you’re going to stay with us. I need you!”
    Rita was silent.
    â€œRemember our bargain, Ree.”
    â€œWhat bargain?” said Rita in a muffled voice. She had turned away from the window.
    â€œThat you stay till Christmas. By then I’ll know. I could easily have flunked out by then just as I flunked out before. But even if I don’t I’ll know. I’ll know whether to go with you or not.”
    â€œWe’ll see,” said Rita absently.
    7 .
    They reached the Golden Isles of Georgia in time for the first tropical storm of the year. The wind whipped over the gray ocean, out of kilter with the slow rhythm of the waves, tore up patches of spume, and raised a spindrift. Georgians had sense enough to go home and so the Vaughts had the hotel to themselves, an honorable old hacienda of wide glassed-in vestibules opening into conservatories and recreation rooms, and rows of brass pots planted with ferns, great cretaceous gymnosperms from the days of Henry Grady, dry and dusty as turkey wings. They looked at stuffed birds and group photographs of Southern governors and played mahjong.
    A hundred servants waited on them, so black and respectful, so absolutely amiable and well-disposed that it was possible to believe that they really were. One or two of them were by way of being characters and allowed themselves to get on a footing with you. In a day’s time they had a standing joke going as if you had been there a month. One bold fellow noticed the engineer take out his red book and read a few maxims as he waited for the elevator. “Now he’s gon’ be the smart one!” he announced to the hotel and later meeting him in the hall would therefore holler: “You got your book with you?” with a special sort of boldness, even a recklessness, which he took to be his due by virtue of the very credential of his amiability. The engineer laughed politely and even cackled a bit in order to appear the proper damn fool they would have him be.
    By four o’clock the afternoon had turned yellow and dark. The engineer and Jamie found some rook cards and played a game in the conservatory, which still had a magic lantern from the days when lectures were delivered to vacationers on birds and sea shells. When the wind picked up, the engineer decided to go see to the Trav-L-Aire. Jamie wouldn’t come. He went out of his way to tell the engineer he was going to telephone his sister Val.
    â€œWhat for?” the engineer asked him, seeing that the other wanted him to ask.
    â€œWhen I feel bad, I call her and she makes me feel better.”
    â€œIs she the sister who joined the religious order?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAre you religious?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThen what good can she do you?” They had fallen into the abrupt mocking but not wholly unserious way of talking which people who spend a lot of time together get into.
    â€œShe is not religious either, at least not in the ordinary sense.”
    â€œWhat is she doing in a religious order?”
    â€œI don’t know. Anyhow that is not what I’m interested in.”
    â€œWhat are you interested in?” asked the engineer, sniffing the old rook cards. They smelled like money.
    â€œI thought she might give me a job.”
    â€œDoing