Babylon Revisited Read Online Free

Personally I like her, but my theory is that Swedes react rather badly on us as a whole. Scandinavians, you know, have the largest suicide rate in the world.”
    “Why do you live here if it’s so depressing?”
    “Oh, it doesn’t get me. I’m pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.”
    “But writers all speak about the South being tragic. You know—Spanish señoritas, black hair and daggers an’ haunting music.”
    He shook his head.
    “No, the Northern races are the tragic races—they don’t indulge in the cheering luxury of tears.”
    Sally Carrol thought of her graveyard. She supposed that that was vaguely what she had meant when she said it didn’t depress her.
    “The Italians are about the gayest people in the world—but it’s adull subject,” he broke off. “Anyway, I want to tell you you’re marrying a pretty fine man.”
    Sally Carrol was moved by an impulse of confidence.
    “I know. I’m the sort of person who wants to be taken care of after a certain point, and I feel sure I will be.”
    “Shall we dance? You know,” he continued as they rose, “it’s encouraging to find a girl who knows what she’s marrying for. Nine-tenths of them think of it as a sort of walking into a moving-picture sunset.”
    She laughed, and liked him immensely.
    Two hours later on the way home she nestled near Harry in the back seat.
    “Oh, Harry,” she whispered, “it’s so co-old!”
    “But it’s warm in here, darling girl.”
    “But outside it’s cold; and oh, that howling wind!”
    She buried her face deep in his fur coat and trembled involuntarily as his cold lips kissed the tip of her ear.
    The first week of her visit passed in a whirl. She had her promised toboggan-ride at the back of an automobile through a chill January twilight. Swathed in furs she put in a morning tobogganing on the country-club hill; even tried skiing, to sail through the air for a glorious moment and then land in a tangled laughing bundle on a soft snowdrift. She liked all the winter sports, except an afternoon spent snow-shoeing over a glaring plain under pale yellow sunshine, but she soon realized that these things were for children—that she was being humored and that the enjoyment round her was only a reflection of her own.
    At first the Bellamy family puzzled her. The men were reliable and she liked them; to Mr. Bellamy especially, with his iron-gray hair and energetic dignity, she took an immediate fancy, once she found that he was born in Kentucky; this made of him a link between the old life and the new. But toward the women she felt a definite hostility. Myra, her future sister-in-law, seemed the essence of spiritless conventionality. Her conversation was so utterly devoid of personality that Sally Carrol, who came from a country where a certain amount of charm and assurancecould be taken for granted in the women, was inclined to despise her.
    “If those women aren’t beautiful,” she thought, “they’re nothing. They just fade out when you look at them. They’re glorified domestics. Men are the centre of every mixed group.”
    Lastly there was Mrs. Bellamy, whom Sally Carrol detested. The first day’s impression of an egg had been confirmed—an egg with a cracked, veiny voice and such an ungracious dumpiness of carriage that Sally Carrol felt that if she once fell she would surely scramble. In addition, Mrs. Bellamy seemed to typify the town in being innately hostile to strangers. She called Sally Carrol “Sally,” and could not be persuaded that the double name was anything more than a tedious ridiculous nickname. To Sally Carrol this shortening of her name was like presenting her to the public half clothed. She loved “Sally Carrol”; she loathed “Sally.” She knew also that Harry’s mother disapproved of her bobbed hair; and she had never dared smoke down-stairs after that first day when Mrs. Bellamy had come into the library sniffing violently.
    Of all the men