Page 242 - tender-is-the-night

‘She’s so polite.’
‘You and Rosemary are the politest people I’ve ever
known, but she means this.’
‘My politeness is a trick of the heart.’
This was partly true. From his father Dick had learned
the somewhat conscious good manners of the young South-
erner coming north after the Civil War. Often he used them
and just as often he despised them because they were not a
protest against how unpleasant selfishness was but against
how unpleasant it looked.
‘I’m in love with Rosemary,’ he told her suddenly. ‘It’s a
kind of self-indulgence saying that to you.’
It seemed very strange and official to him, as if the very
tables and chairs in the Café des Alliées would remember
it forever. Already he felt her absence from these skies: on
the beach he could only remember the sun-torn flesh of
her shoulder; at Tarmes he crushed out her footprints as he
crossed the garden; and now the orchestra launching into
the Nice Carnival Song, an echo of last year’s vanished gai-
eties, started the little dance that went on all about her. In
a hundred hours she had come to possess all the world’s
dark magic; the blinding belladonna, the caffein converting
physical into nervous energy, the mandragora that imposes
harmony.
With an effort he once more accepted the fiction that he
shared Mrs. Speers’ detachment.
‘You and Rosemary aren’t really alike,’ he said. ‘The wis-
dom she got from you is all molded up into her persona,
into the mask she faces the world with. She doesn’t think;

242 Tender is the Night