Page 108 - tender-is-the-night

aforementioned qualities of a hand moving among broken
glass—which qualities limited and defined the majority of
those present.
These were of two sorts. There were the Americans and
English who had been dissipating all spring and summer,
so that now everything they did had a purely nervous inspi-
ration. They were very quiet and lethargic at certain hours
and then they exploded into sudden quarrels and break-
downs and seductions. The other class, who might be called
the exploiters, was formed by the sponges, who were sober,
serious people by comparison, with a purpose in life and no
time for fooling. These kept their balance best in that envi-
ronment, and what tone there was, beyond the apartment’s
novel organization of light values, came from them.
The Frankenstein took down Dick and Rosemary at a
gulp—it separated them immediately and Rosemary sud-
denly discovered herself to be an insincere little person,
living all in the upper registers of her throat and wishing the
director would come. There was however such a wild beat-
ing of wings in the room that she did not feel her position
was more incongruous than any one else’s. In addition, her
training told and after a series of semi-military turns, shifts,
and marches she found herself presumably talking to a neat,
slick girl with a lovely boy’s face, but actually absorbed by a
conversation taking place on a sort of gun-metal ladder di-
agonally opposite her and four feet away.
There was a trio of young women sitting on the bench.
They were all tall and slender with small heads groomed
like manikins’ heads, and as they talked the heads waved

108 Tender is the Night