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beach this summer,’ Nicole admitted. ‘OUR beach that Dick
made out of a pebble pile.’ She considered, and then lower-
ing her voice out of the range of the trio of nannies who
sat back under another umbrella. ‘Still, they’re preferable to
those British last summer who kept shouting about: ‘Isn’t
the sea blue? Isn’t the sky white? Isn’t little Nellie’s nose
red?’’
Rosemary thought she would not like to have Nicole for
an enemy.
‘But you didn’t see the fight,’ Nicole continued. ‘The day
before you came, the married man, the one with the name
that sounds like a substitute for gasoline or butter—‘
‘McKisco?’
‘Yes—well they were having words and she tossed some
sand in his face. So naturally he sat on top of her and rubbed
her face in the sand. We were—electrified. I wanted Dick to
interfere.’
‘I think,’ said Dick Diver, staring down abstractedly at
the straw mat, ‘that I’ll go over and invite them to dinner.’
‘No, you won’t,’ Nicole told him quickly.
‘I think it would be a very good thing. They’re here—let’s
adjust ourselves.’
‘We’re very well adjusted,’ she insisted, laughing. ‘I’m not
going to have MY nose rubbed in the sand. I’m a mean, hard
woman,’ she explained to Rosemary, and then raising her
voice, ‘Children, put on your bathing suits!’
Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typi-
cal one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her
memory at the mention of swimming. Simultaneously the

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