BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
From The Saturday Evening Post
The restless, wearied eye of the tired magazine reader resting for a critical second on the
above title will judge it to be merely metaphorical. Stories about the cup and the lip and
the bad penny and the new broom rarely have anything to do with cups and lips and
pennies and brooms. This story is the great exception. It has to do with an actual,
material, visible and large-as-life camel's back.
Starting from the neck we shall work tailward. Meet Mr. Perry Parkhurst, twenty-eight,
lawyer, native of Toledo. Perry has nice teeth, a Harvard education, and parts his hair in
the middle. You have met him before--in Cleveland, Portland, St. Paul, Indianapolis,
Kansas City and elsewhere. Baker Brothers, New York, pause on their semi-annual trip
through the West to clothe him; Montmorency & Co., dispatch a young man posthaste
every three months to see that he has the correct number of little punctures on his shoes.
He has a domestic roadster now, will have a French roadster if he lives long enough, and
doubtless a Chinese one if it comes into fashion. He looks like the advertisement of the
young man rubbing his sunset-coloured chest with liniment, goes East every year to the
Harvard reunion--does everything--smokes a little too much--Oh, you've seen him.
Meet his girl. Her name is Betty Medill, and she would take well in the movies. Her
father gives her two hundred a month to dress on and she has tawny eyes and hair, and
feather fans of three colours. Meet her father, Cyrus Medill. Though he is to all
appearances flesh and blood he is, strange to say, commonly known in Toledo as the
Aluminum Man. But when he sits in his club window with two or three Iron Men and the
White Pine Man and the Brass Man they look very much as you and I do, only more so, if
you know what I mean.
Meet the camel's back--or no--don't meet the camel's back yet. Meet the story.
During the Christmas holidays of 1919, the first real Christmas holidays since the war,
there took place in Toledo, counting only the people with the italicized the, forty-one
dinner parties, sixteen dances, six luncheons male and female, eleven luncheons female,
twelve teas, four stag dinners, two weddings and thirteen bridge parties. It was the
cumulative effect of all this that moved Perry Parkhurst on the twenty-ninth day of
December to a desperate decision.
Betty Medill would marry him and she wouldn't marry him. She was having such a good
time that she hated to take such a definite step. Meanwhile, their secret engagement had
got so long that it seemed as if any day it might break off of its own weight. A little man
named Warburton, who knew it all, persuaded Perry to superman her, to get a marriage
license and go up to the Medill house and tell her she'd have to marry him at once or call
it off forever. This is some stunt--but Perry tried it on December the twenty-ninth. He
