Page 215 - tender-is-the-night

VIII

During the next weeks Dick experienced a vast dissatis-
faction. The pathological origin and mechanistic defeat of
the affair left a flat and metallic taste. Nicole’s emotions had
been used unfairly— what if they turned out to have been
his own? Necessarily he must absent himself from felicity
a while—in dreams he saw her walking on the clinic path
swinging her wide straw hat... .
One time he saw her in person; as he walked past the Pal-
ace Hotel, a magnificent Rolls curved into the half-moon
entrance. Small within its gigantic proportions, and buoyed
up by the power of a hundred superfluous horses, sat Nicole
and a young woman whom he assumed was her sister. Nicole
saw him and momentarily her lips parted in an expression of
fright. Dick shifted his hat and passed, yet for a moment the
air around him was loud with the circlings of all the goblins
on the Gross-Münster. He tried to write the matter out of his
mind in a memorandum that went into detail as to the sol-
emn régime before her; the possibilities of another ‘push’ of
the malady under the stresses which the world would inevi-
tably supply—in all a memorandum that would have been
convincing to any one save to him who had written it.
The total value of this effort was to make him realize
once more how far his emotions were involved; thenceforth
he resolutely provided antidotes. One was the telephone

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