Chapter 1: Amory, Son of Beatrice
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the
stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father,
an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a
habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy
at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful
Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world
was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In
consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height
of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial
moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For
many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an
unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless,
silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife,
continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t
understand her.
But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on
her father’s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the
Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her
youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally
wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the
consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant
education she had—her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was
versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by
name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and
Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have
had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to
prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened
in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice
O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite
impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of
things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming
about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all
ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped
the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.
