Page 118 - tender-is-the-night

to go with us.’
Her face was pale with fatigue in the false dawn. Two
wan dark spots in her cheek marked where the color was
by day.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I promised Mary North to stay along
with them—or Abe’ll never go to bed. Maybe you could do
something.’
‘Don’t you know you can’t do anything about people?’ he
advised her. ‘If Abe was my room-mate in college, tight for
the first time, it’d be different. Now there’s nothing to do.’
‘Well, I’ve got to stay. He says he’ll go to bed if we only
come to the Halles with him,’ she said, almost defiantly.
He kissed the inside of her elbow quickly.
‘Don’t let Rosemary go home alone,’ Nicole called to
Mary as they left. ‘We feel responsible to her mother.’
—Later Rosemary and the Norths and a manufacturer of
dolls’ voices from Newark and ubiquitous Collis and a big
splendidly dressed oil Indian named George T. Horsepro-
tection were riding along on top of thousands of carrots
in a market wagon. The earth in the carrot beards was fra-
grant and sweet in the darkness, and Rosemary was so high
up in the load that she could hardly see the others in the
long shadow between infrequent street lamps. Their voices
came from far off, as if they were having experiences differ-
ent from hers, different and far away, for she was with Dick
in her heart, sorry she had come with the Norths, wishing
she was at the hotel and him asleep across the hall, or that
he was here beside her with the warm darkness streaming
down.

118 Tender is the Night