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At eighteen, when he went to New Haven, Anson was tall and
thick-set, with a clear complexion and a healthy color from the
ordered life he had led in school. His hair was yellow and grew in a
funny way on his head, his nose was beaked - these two things kept
him from being handsome – but he had a confident charm and a
certain brusque style, and the upper-class men who passed him on the
street knew without being told that he was a rich boy and had gone to
one of the best schools. Nevertheless, his very superiority kept him
from being a success in college – the independence was mistaken for
egotism, and the refusal to accept Yale standards with the proper awe
seemed to belittle all those who had. So, long before he graduated, he
began to shift the centre of his life to New York.
He was at home in New York – there was his own house with
"the kind of servants you can't get any more"- and his own family, of
which, because of his good humor and a certain ability to make things
go, he was rapidly becoming the centre, and the debutante parties,
and the correct manly world of the men's clubs, and the occasional
wild spree with the gallant girls whom New Haven only knew from
the fifth row. His aspirations were conventional enough – they
included even the irreproachable shadow he would some day marry,
but they differed from the aspirations of the majority of young men in
that there was no mist over them, none of that quality which is
variously known as "idealism" or "illusion." Anson accepted without
reservation the world of high finance and high extravagance, of
divorce and dissipation, of snobbery and of privilege. Most of our
lives end as a compromise – it was as a compromise that his life
began.
He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was just
out of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the
systematized hysteria of the war. In the blue-green uniform of the
naval aviation he came down to Pensacola, where the hotel orchestras
played "I'm sorry, dear," and we young officers danced with the girls.
Every one liked him, and though he ran with the drinkers and wasn't
an especially good pilot, even the instructors treated him with a
certain respect. He was always having long talks with them in his
confident, logical voice – talks which ended by his getting himself,
or, more frequently, another officer, out of some impending trouble.
He was convivial, bawdy, robustly avid for pleasure, and we were all