The Beautiful and Damned: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

On the train to the training camp, Anthony sits next to a Sicilian man who doesn’t talk much. The men are told not to smoke, but a moment later this instruction is rescinded. Anthony smokes along with all the others. He reads a newspaper for a time. In the midst of an article about a debate in Shakespeareville, Kansas, over what to call the American troops, his mind wanders to Gloria and why she might have been late to the train station. He returns to the paper and reads that the Shakespeareville Chamber of Commerce settled on “Liberty Lads.”

By the end of the train ride, everyone is overheated. Anthony doesn’t like the food but must get used to it. The camp smells of garbage, and Anthony must get used to an exhausting routine of physical examinations and drills. The only part of his daily routine he enjoys is calisthenics, when he feels he is doing something worthwhile. He thinks it is ridiculous that the blood pressure problem that prevented him from becoming an officer does not prevent him from being a private.

After a week’s quarantine, Anthony is allowed to go into town. An officer yells at him to salute as he passes. Anthony hates the indignity of his position. A girl in a lilac dress and her friend witness the encounter and laugh. Anthony approaches her afterwards and walks both girls home. He is mesmerized by the girl in lilac, whose social status he can’t tell from her southern accent. He convinces her to go to a movie with him.

The girl in lilac turns out to be named Dorothy Raycroft. Anthony embarks on an affair with her not because he finds her more captivating than Gloria but because she represents a rest from his daily routine at the training camp. After that first evening together, he kisses her. Reminded momentarily of his former passion for Gloria, he returns to the camp to write her a letter.

Dorothy Raycroft is nineteen. She graduated high school in the lowest quarter of her class two days before the death of her father, a relatively unsuccessful shop owner. Everyone in town knows the story of how she slept with a store clerk who immediately moved away to New York. She has since flung herself into affairs with two other men. She has kissed others but maintains a “trio” of past sexual partners. When she meets Anthony, he reminds her of her own tragedies. The first night they meet, she whispers, “Do you love me?” and he just kisses her.

Anthony realizes that for the first time in his life, he is in the same ranks as the men who have always served him. He barely talks to any of them, and they are suspicious of him as a member of the leisure class on account of his profession being listed first as “author” and then as “student.” Each week he goes into town to get drunk. He feels that he is “pulling one over” on the government by doing so. As the weeks go by, he watches a few of the other men get on the captain’s bad side through such infractions as neglecting to shave often enough.

By December, Anthony and Gloria’s briefly passionate correspondence has dropped off. She updates him on such affairs as the lawsuit, which has been pushed back to spring again. Anthony reflects that he does not want Gloria to come South for a number of reasons, but mostly it is because of his attraction to Dorothy. He spends nearly every night with her. He likes that unlike Gloria, who is his equal, to her his caresses are a “boon.” She sometimes dreams that he will divorce Gloria. She has forgotten her former lovers and constantly tries to get him to profess his love to her. He never enunciates the phrase, “I love you.”

Anthony receives a promotion to corporal. He thinks about the fact that he is now a soldier instead of a civilian and realizes that the world is divided into two classes: “their own kind – and those without.” It has never occurred to him before that he is among a privileged class in every way. During this period, he continues to receive letters from Gloria that express more and more regret for how things have turned out. In June, she suddenly stops writing.

As spring passes into summer, Anthony continues enjoying his days with Dorothy while other men fare far worse at the camp. The Sicilian who Anthony initially sat next to on the train is tasked with fitting shoes to horses, despite his great fear of horses. The captain does nothing to help him, and the Sicilian eventually has his skull crushed by a rearing stallion.

In mid-July, Anthony must tell Dorothy that the camp is being relocated to Mississippi and that he is leaving. She breaks down in tears, accusing him of returning to Gloria and telling him that she will die if he leaves. Her tone frightens him, and he invites her to come with him when he leaves.

Mid-September at Camp Boone, Mississippi, Anthony tries and fails to write a letter to Gloria. He worries about her silence and wonders if she, like him, has found a new lover. He remembers her remark that if she ever wanted something she would simply take it, but comforts himself by recalling that she eventually realized her own capacity for jealousy regarding him. Having applied and been denied for a furlough to go see her, he is attempting to write her to come visit him.

Meanwhile, Anthony has been keeping Dorothy in a boarding house in town. In the midst of his letter writing, he eagerly takes a phone call that he hopes is Gloria but that turns out to be Dorothy. She tells him she must see him and threatens suicide if he does not come immediately. He rushes off to the boarding house and stays with her for a few hours. Upon his late return, which he knows is forbidden, he gives a fake name to the guard so that his record will not be marred. However, the guard recognizes him a few days later. He is stripped of the rank of corporal and sentenced to three weeks in the guard-house.

During his sentence in the guard-house, Anthony has an increasingly paranoid sense that he is being watched. He attempts to exhaust himself with the physical labor of spreading gravel so he can just fall asleep at the end of the day. He grows physically weaker and eventually collapses. When he comes to, he finds a terse letter from Gloria asking him to come to New York for the trial in November, along with a tear-stained, incoherent letter from Dorothy. At noon, he is sent to the hospital with influenza. He recovers just in time for the regiment to go to New York in November.

By the time the regiment reaches Long Island, an armistice is imminent. However, troops are still being sent to France. The thought of being shipped to France as a replacement sickens Anthony, and he tries immediately to get a furlough to go see Gloria in the city. He is disappointed to learn that no private is allowed to leave the camp on account of influenza quarantine. However, within a day, the regiment is disbanded as Germany surrenders. After the captain’s lecture about how the troops shouldn’t count the war as over yet, Anthony runs off base, clicking his heels.

It seems to take years to get through the city and back to the apartment where Anthony hopes to find Gloria. She is out at the Armistice Ball when he arrives. He rifles through her things for a sign that she is having an affair and breaks down in sentimental tears when he discovers a pile of his own letters tied together with a blue ribbon. “I’m not fit to touch her,” he says. “I’m not fit to touch her little hand.” He leaves the apartment for the Astor, where the ball is being held. He sees her across the room and makes his way through the crowd to her. They reunite with a kiss.