Page 297 - tender-is-the-night

the year. Once he had cut through things, solving the most
complicated equations as the simplest problems of his sim-
plest patients. Between the time he found Nicole flowering
under a stone on the Zurichsee and the moment of his meet-
ing with Rosemary the spear had been blunted.
Watching his father’s struggles in poor parishes had
wedded a desire for money to an essentially unacquisitive
nature. It was not a healthy necessity for security—he had
never felt more sure of himself, more thoroughly his own
man, than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. Yet he had
been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted
his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit
vaults.
‘There should have been a settlement in the Continental
style; but it isn’t over yet. I’ve wasted eight years teaching
the rich the ABC’s of human decency, but I’m not done. I’ve
got too many unplayed trumps in my hand.’
He loitered among the fallow rose bushes and the beds
of damp sweet indistinguishable fern. It was warm for Oc-
tober but cool enough to wear a heavy tweed coat buttoned
by a little elastic tape at the neck. A figure detached itself
from the black shape of a tree and he knew it was the wom-
an whom he had passed in the lobby coming out. He was in
love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a
distance, their shadows on a wall.
Her back was toward him as she faced the lights of the
town. He scratched a match that she must have heard, but
she remained motionless.
—Was it an invitation? Or an indication of obliviousness?

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