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THE LAY ANTHONY

A Romance

By Joseph Hergesheimer

New York & London

Mitchell Kennerley 1914


"_... if in passing from this deceitful world into true life love is
not forgotten,... I know that among the most joyous souls of the third
heaven my Fiametta sees my pain. Pray her, if the sweet draught of Lethe
has not robbed me of her,... to obtain my ascent to her._"

--Giovanni Boccaccio


TO

DOROTHY

THIS

FIGMENT OF A PERPETUAL FLOWERING

THE LAY ANTHONY




I--A ROMANCE

NOT for the honor of winning the Vanderbilt Cup, nor for the glory of
pitching a major league baseball team into the world's championship,
would Tony Ball have admitted to the familiar and derisive group in the
drugstore that he was--in the exact, physical aspect of the word--pure.
Secretly, and in an entirely natural and healthy manner, he was ashamed
of his innocence. He carefully concealed it in an elaborate assumption
of wide worldly knowledge and experience, in an attitude of cynical
comprehension, and indifference toward _girls_.

But he might have spared himself the effort, the fictions, of his
pose--had he proclaimed his ignorance aloud from the brilliantly lighted
entrance to the drugstore no one who knew him in the midweek, night
throng on Ellerton's main street would have credited Anthony with
anything beyond a thin and surprising joke. He was, at twenty, the
absolute, adventurous opposite of any conscious or cloistered virtue:
the careless carriage of his big, loose frame; his frank, smiling grey
