Page 256 - tender-is-the-night

had managed to come all the way to Gstaad.
He was forty. Upon his healthy maturity reposed a set
of pleasant official manners, but he was most at home in
a somewhat stuffy safety from which he could despise the
broken rich whom he reeducated. His scientific heredity
might have bequeathed him a wider world but he seemed
to have deliberately chosen the standpoint of an humbler
class, a choice typified by his selection of a wife. At the hotel
Baby Warren made a quick examination of him, and fail-
ing to find any of the hall-marks she respected, the subtler
virtues or courtesies by which the privileged classes recog-
nized one another, treated him thereafter with her second
manner. Nicole was always a little afraid of him. Dick liked
him, as he liked his friends, without reservations.
For the evening they were sliding down the hill into the
village, on those little sleds which serve the same purpose
as gondolas do in Venice. Their destination was a hotel with
an old-fashioned Swiss tap-room, wooden and resounding,
a room of clocks, kegs, steins, and antlers. Many parties at
long tables blurred into one great party and ate fondue—a
peculiarly indigestible form of Welsh rarebit, mitigated by
hot spiced wine.
It was jolly in the big room; the younger Englishman re-
marked it and Dick conceded that there was no other word.
With the pert heady wine he relaxed and pretended that the
world was all put together again by the gray-haired men of
the golden nineties who shouted old glees at the piano, by
the young voices and the bright costumes toned into the
room by the swirling smoke. For a moment he felt that they

256 Tender is the Night