Page 115 - tender-is-the-night

XVIII

Although the Divers were honestly apathetic to orga-
nized fashion, they were nevertheless too acute to abandon
its contemporaneous rhythm and beat—Dick’s parties were
all concerned with excitement, and a chance breath of fresh
night air was the more precious for being experienced in the
intervals of the excitement.
The party that night moved with the speed of a slap-
stick comedy. They were twelve, they were sixteen, they
were quartets in separate motors bound on a quick Odys-
sey over Paris. Everything had been foreseen. People joined
them as if by magic, accompanied them as specialists, al-
most guides, through a phase of the evening, dropped out
and were succeeded by other people, so that it appeared as
if the freshness of each one had been husbanded for them
all day. Rosemary appreciated how different it was from any
party in Hollywood, no matter how splendid in scale. There
was, among many diversions, the car of the Shah of Persia.
Where Dick had commandeered this vehicle, what bribery
was employed, these were facts of irrelevance. Rosemary ac-
cepted it as merely a new facet of the fabulous, which for
two years had filled her life. The car had been built on a spe-
cial chassis in America. Its wheels were of silver, so was the
radiator. The inside of the body was inlaid with innumera-
ble brilliants which would be replaced with true gems by the

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