ABSTRACT
Here is a normal case: a girl meets a young man at a college party. Let us say he wears a red flannel shirt, leans against the fireplace with superior ease and turns upon the girl a pair of eyes whose ferocious intensity is half ambition and half near-sightedness. At this age no special achievement or public virtue has yet graced him, but his head is a convicted one. He is a writer, a painter, a musician, some species of fanatic doodler—in short, an artist. All he wants of his future is to master the mystery of personality and communicate a sense of the glory of life on earth; he is hell-bent for immortality. And that’s all he wants.
