Page 130 - tender-is-the-night

children; Rosemary was sharply rebuked in a short passage
between the women: ‘You’d better leave the message with
a waiter,’ Nicole’s voice was stern and unmodulated, ‘we’re
leaving immediately.’
Rosemary got it, took it without resentment.
‘I’ll let it go then. Good-by, you darlings.’
Dick asked for the check; the Divers relaxed, chewing
tentatively on toothpicks.
‘Well—‘ they said together.
He saw a flash of unhappiness on her mouth, so brief that
only he would have noticed, and he could pretend not to
have seen. What did Nicole think? Rosemary was one of a
dozen people he had ‘worked over’ in the past years: these
had included a French circus clown, Abe and Mary North,
a pair of dancers, a writer, a painter, a comedienne from
the Grand Guignol, a half-crazy pederast from the Russian
Ballet, a promising tenor they had staked to a year in Milan.
Nicole well knew how seriously these people interpreted his
interest and enthusiasm; but she realized also that, except
while their children were being born, Dick had not spent
a night apart from her since their marriage. On the other
hand, there was a pleasingness about him that simply had
to be used—those who possessed that pleasingness had to
keep their hands in, and go along attaching people that they
had no use to make of.
Now Dick hardened himself and let minutes pass with-
out making any gesture of confidence, any representation of
constantly renewed surprise that they were one together.
Collis Clay out of the South edged a passage between the

130 Tender is the Night