Page 155 - tender-is-the-night

XXIV

With his miniature leather brief-case in his hand Rich-
ard Diver walked from the seventh arrondisement—where
he left a note for Maria Wallis signed ‘Dicole,’ the word with
which he and Nicole had signed communications in the
first days of love—to his shirtmakers where the clerks made
a fuss over him out of proportion to the money he spent.
Ashamed at promising so much to these poor Englishmen,
with his fine manners, his air of having the key to secu-
rity, ashamed of making a tailor shift an inch of silk on his
arm. Afterward he went to the bar of the Crillon and drank
a small coffee and two fingers of gin.
As he entered the hotel the halls had seemed unnaturally
bright; when he left he realized that it was because it had al-
ready turned dark outside. It was a windy four-o’clock night
with the leaves on the Champs Élysées singing and failing,
thin and wild. Dick turned down the Rue de Rivoli, walking
two squares under the arcades to his bank where there was
mail. Then he took a taxi and started up the Champs Élysées
through the first patter of rain, sitting alone with his love.
Back at two o’clock in the Roi George corridor the beauty
of Nicole had been to the beauty of Rosemary as the beau-
ty of Leonardo’s girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator.
Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened,
the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple

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