Page 305 - tender-is-the-night

The McKiscos got off at Gibraltar. Next evening in Naples
Dick picked up a lost and miserable family of two girls and
their mother in the bus from the hotel to the station. He had
seen them on the ship. An overwhelming desire to help, or
to be admired, came over him: he showed them fragments
of gaiety; tentatively he bought them wine, with pleasure
saw them begin to regain their proper egotism. He pretend-
ed they were this and that, and falling in with his own plot,
and drinking too much to sustain the illusion, and all this
time the women, thought only that this was a windfall from
heaven. He withdrew from them as the night waned and the
train rocked and snorted at Cassino and Frosinone. After
weird American partings in the station at Rome, Dick went
to the Hotel Quirinal, somewhat exhausted.
At the desk he suddenly stared and upped his head. As if
a drink were acting on him, warming the lining of his stom-
ach, throwing a flush up into his brain, he saw the person
he had come to see, the person for whom he had made the
Mediterranean crossing.
Simultaneously Rosemary saw him, acknowledging him
before placing him; she looked back startled, and, leaving
the girl she was with, she hurried over. Holding himself
erect, holding his breath, Dick turned to her. As she came
across the lobby, her beauty all groomed, like a young horse
dosed with Black-seed oil, and hoops varnished, shocked
him awake; but it all came too quick for him to do any-
thing except conceal his fatigue as best he could. To meet
her starry-eyed confidence he mustered an insincere pan-
tomime implying, ‘You WOULD turn up here—of all the

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