Page 101 - tender-is-the-night

her prettiness never seemed exactly her own but rather an
acquirement, like her French. Nevertheless, in the taxi she
looked at Nicole, matching herself against her. There were
all the potentialities for romantic love in that lovely body
and in the delicate mouth, sometimes tight, sometimes ex-
pectantly half open to the world. Nicole had been a beauty
as a young girl and she would be a beauty later when her
skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones—the essen-
tial structure was there. She had been white-Saxon-blonde
but she was more beautiful now that her hair had darkened
than when it had been like a cloud and more beautiful than
she.
‘We lived there,’ Rosemary suddenly pointed to a build-
ing in the Rue des Saints-Péres.
‘That’s strange. Because when I was twelve Mother and
Baby and I once spent a winter there,’ and she pointed to a
hotel directly across the street. The two dingy fronts stared
at them, gray echoes of girlhood.
‘We’d just built our Lake Forest house and we were econ-
omizing,’ Nicole continued. ‘At least Baby and I and the
governess economized and Mother travelled.’
‘We were economizing too,’ said Rosemary, realizing
that the word meant different things to them.
‘Mother always spoke of it very carefully as a small ho-
tel—‘ Nicole gave her quick magnetic little laugh, ‘—I mean
instead of saying a ‘cheap’ hotel. If any swanky friends
asked us our address we’d never say, ‘We’re in a dingy little
hole over in the apache quarter where we’re glad of run-
ning water,’—we’d say ‘We’re in a small hotel.’ As if all the

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