Page 100 - tender-is-the-night

XVI

She woke up cooled and shamed. The sight of her beauty
in the mirror did not reassure her but only awakened the
ache of yesterday and a letter, forwarded by her mother,
from the boy who had taken her to the Yale prom last fall,
which announced his presence in Paris was no help—all
that seemed far away. She emerged from her room for the
ordeal of meeting the Divers weighted with a double trou-
ble. But it was hidden by a sheath as impermeable as Nicole’s
when they met and went together to a series of fittings. It
was consoling, though, when Nicole remarked, apropos of
a distraught saleswoman: ‘Most people think everybody
feels about them much more violently than they actual-
ly do—they think other people’s opinions of them swing
through great arcs of approval or disapproval.’ Yesterday
in her expansiveness Rosemary would have resented that
remark—to-day in her desire to minimize what had hap-
pened she welcomed it eagerly. She admired Nicole for her
beauty and her wisdom, and also for the first time in her
life she was jealous. Just before leaving Gausse’s hotel her
mother had said in that casual tone, which Rosemary knew
concealed her most significant opinions, that Nicole was a
great beauty, with the frank implication that Rosemary was
not. This did not bother Rosemary, who had only recently
been allowed to learn that she was even personable; so that

100 Tender is the Night