Page 347 - tender-is-the-night

‘I want to make a speech,’ Dick cried. ‘I want to explain
to these people how I raped a five-year-old girl. Maybe I
did—‘
‘Come along.’
Baby was waiting with a doctor in a taxi-cab. Dick did
not want to look at her and he disliked the doctor, whose
stern manner revealed him as one of that least palpable of
European types, the Latin moralist. Dick summed up his
conception of the disaster, but no one had much to say. In
his room in the Quirinal the doctor washed off the rest of
the blood and the oily sweat, set his nose, his fractured ribs
and fingers, disinfected the smaller wounds and put a hope-
ful dressing on the eye. Dick asked for a quarter of a grain
of morphine, for he was still wide awake and full of nervous
energy. With the morphine he fell asleep; the doctor and
Collis left and Baby waited with him until a woman could
arrive from the English nursing home. It had been a hard
night but she had the satisfaction of feeling that, whatever
Dick’s previous record was, they now possessed a moral su-
periority over him for as long as he proved of any use.

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