Page 102 - tender-is-the-night

big ones were too noisy and vulgar for us. Of course the
friends always saw through us and told everyone about it,
but Mother always said it showed we knew our way around
Europe. She did, of course: she was born a German citizen.
But her mother was American, and she was brought up in
Chicago, and she was more American than European.’
They were meeting the others in two minutes, and Rose-
mary reconstructed herself once more as they got out of the
taxi in the Rue Guynemer, across from the Luxembourg
Gardens. They were lunching in the Norths’ already dis-
mantled apartment high above the green mass of leaves. The
day seemed different to Rosemary from the day before—
When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed
like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, every-
thing was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to
fall in love with her. She felt wildly happy, felt the warm sap
of emotion being pumped through her body. A cool, clear
confidence deepened and sang in her. She scarcely looked at
Dick but she knew everything was all right.
After luncheon the Divers and the Norths and Rosemary
went to the Franco-American Films, to be joined by Collis
Clay, her young man from New Haven, to whom she had
telephoned. He was a Georgian, with the peculiarly regular,
even stencilled ideas of Southerners who are educated in the
North. Last winter she had thought him attractive—once
they held hands in an automobile going from New Haven to
New York; now he no longer existed for her.
In the projection room she sat between Collis Clay and
Dick while the mechanic mounted the reels of Daddy’s Girl

102 Tender is the Night