Page 162 - tender-is-the-night

XXV

When he had tottered out, Dick and Rosemary embraced
fleetingly. There was a dust of Paris over both of them
through which they scented each other: the rubber guard
on Dick’s fountain pen, the faintest odor of warmth from
Rosemary’s neck and shoulders. For another half-minute
Dick clung to the situation; Rosemary was first to return
to reality.
‘I must go, youngster,’ she said.
They blinked at each other across a widening space, and
Rosemary made an exit that she had learned young, and on
which no director had ever tried to improve.
She opened the door of her room and went directly to
her desk where she had suddenly remembered leaving her
wristwatch. It was there; slipping it on she glanced down at
the daily letter to her mother, finishing the last sentence in
her mind. Then, rather gradually, she realized without turn-
ing about that she was not alone in the room.
In an inhabited room there are refracting objects only
half noticed: varnished wood, more or less polished brass,
silver and ivory, and beyond these a thousand conveyers of
light and shadow so mild that one scarcely thinks of them
as that, the tops of pictureframes, the edges of pencils or
ash-trays, of crystal or china ornaments; the totality of
this refraction—appealing to equally subtle reflexes of the

162 Tender is the Night