Page 231 - tender-is-the-night

Sincerely,
BETH EVAN WARREN.
Dick was furious—Miss Warren had known he had a bi-
cycle with him; yet she had so phrased her note that it was
impossible to refuse. Throw us together! Sweet propinquity
and the Warren money!
He was wrong; Baby Warren had no such intentions. She
had looked Dick over with worldly eyes, she had measured
him with the warped rule of an Anglophile and found him
wanting—in spite of the fact that she found him toothsome.
But for her he was too ‘intellectual’ and she pigeonholed
him with a shabby-snobby crowd she had once known in
London—he put himself out too much to be really of the
correct stuff. She could not see how he could be made into
her idea of an aristocrat.
In addition to that he was stubborn—she had seen him
leave her conversation and get down behind his eyes in that
odd way that people did, half a dozen times. She had not
liked Nicole’s free and easy manner as a child and now she
was sensibly habituated to thinking of her as a ‘gone coon”;
and anyhow Doctor Diver was not the sort of medical man
she could envisage in the family.
She only wanted to use him innocently as a conve-
nience.
But her request had the effect that Dick assumed she de-
sired. A ride in a train can be a terrible, heavy-hearted or
comic thing; it can be a trial flight; it can be a prefiguration
of another journey just as a given day with a friend can be
long, from the taste of hurry in the morning up to the re-

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