Page 228 - tender-is-the-night

ing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans
than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mix-
ture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it
all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale.
As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further
and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself,
drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant,
he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a re-
flection in her wet eyes.
‘My God,’ he gasped, ‘you’re fun to kiss.’
That was talk, but Nicole had a better hold on him now
and she held it; she turned coquette and walked away, leav-
ing him as suspended as in the funicular of the afternoon.
She felt: There, that’ll show him, how conceited; how he
could do with me; oh, wasn’t it wonderful! I’ve got him,
he’s mine. Now in the sequence came flight, but it was all
so sweet and new that she dawdled, wanting to draw all of
it in.
She shivered suddenly. Two thousand feet below she saw
the necklace and bracelet of lights that were Montreux and
Vevey, beyond them a dim pendant of Lausanne. From down
there somewhere ascended a faint sound of dance music.
Nicole was up in her head now, cool as cool, trying to collate
the sentimentalities of her childhood, as deliberate as a man
getting drunk after battle. But she was still afraid of Dick,
who stood near her, leaning, characteristically, against the
iron fence that rimmed the horseshoe; and this prompted
her to say: ‘I can remember how I stood waiting for you in
the garden—holding all my self in my arms like a basket of

228 Tender is the Night