Page 312 - tender-is-the-night

boxed her disarranged hair with her hands. Presently she
drew a chair close to the bed and stroked his cheek.
‘Tell me the truth about you,’ he demanded.
‘I always have.’
‘In a way—but nothing hangs together.’
They both laughed but he pursued.
‘Are you actually a virgin?’
‘No-o-o!’ she sang. ‘I’ve slept with six hundred and forty
men—if that’s the answer you want.’
‘It’s none of my business.’
‘Do you want me for a case in psychology?’
‘Looking at you as a perfectly normal girl of twenty-two,
living in the year nineteen twenty-eight, I guess you’ve tak-
en a few shots at love.’
‘It’s all been—abortive,’ she said.
Dick couldn’t believe her. He could not decide wheth-
er she was deliberately building a barrier between them or
whether this was intended to make an eventual surrender
more significant.
‘Let’s go walk in the Pincio,’ he suggested.
He shook himself straight in his clothes and smoothed his
hair. A moment had come and somehow passed. For three
years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary measured
other men and inevitably his stature had increased to he-
roic size. She did not want him to be like other men, yet
here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take
some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.
Walking on the greensward between cherubs and phi-
losophers, fauns and falling water, she took his arm snugly,

312 Tender is the Night