Page 261 - tender-is-the-night

ing the dark air. Past them figures ran and scrambled, the
younger ones shoving each other from sleds and runners,
landing in the soft snow, then panting after the horses to
drop exhausted on a sled or wail that they were abandoned.
On either side the fields were beneficently tranquil; the space
through which the cavalcade moved was high and limitless.
In the country there was less noise as though they were all
listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow.
In Saanen, they poured into the municipal dance,
crowded with cow herders, hotel servants, shop-keepers, ski
teachers, guides, tourists, peasants. To come into the warm
enclosed place after the pantheistic animal feeling with-
out, was to reassume some absurd and impressive knightly
name, as thunderous as spurred boots in war, as football
cleats on the cement of a locker-room floor. There was con-
ventional yodelling, and the familiar rhythm of it separated
Dick from what he had first found romantic in the scene. At
first he thought it was because he had hounded the girl out
of his consciousness; then it came to him under the form
of what Baby had said: ‘We must think it over carefully—‘
and the unsaid lines back of that: ‘We own you, and you’ll
admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the pretense
of independence.’
It had been years since Dick had bottled up malice
against a creature—since freshman year at New Haven
when he had come upon a popular essay about ‘mental hy-
giene.’ Now he lost his temper at Baby and simultaneously
tried to coop it up within him, resenting her cold rich in-
solence. It would be hundreds of years before any emergent

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