Page 408 - tender-is-the-night

rolling of the carpet, nor what would happen at the end, at
the moment of the leap.
For what might occur thereafter she had no anxiety—
she suspected that that would be the lifting of a burden, an
unblinding of eyes. Nicole had been designed for change,
for flight, with money as fins and wings. The new state of
things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed
for years under the body of a family limousine, should
be stripped to its original self. Nicole could feel the fresh
breeze already—the wrench it was she feared, and the dark
manner of its coming.
The Divers went out on the beach with her white suit and
his white trunks very white against the color of their bod-
ies. Nicole saw Dick peer about for the children among the
confused shapes and shadows of many umbrellas, and as his
mind temporarily left her, ceasing to grip her, she looked at
him with detachment, and decided that he was seeking his
children, not protectively but for protection. Probably it was
the beach he feared, like a deposed ruler secretly visiting an
old court. She had come to hate his world with its delicate
jokes and politenesses, forgetting that for many years it was
the only world open to her. Let him look at it— his beach,
perverted now to the tastes of the tasteless; he could search
it for a day and find no stone of the Chinese Wall he had
once erected around it, no footprint of an old friend.
For a moment Nicole was sorry it was so; remembering
the glass he had raked out of the old trash heap, remember-
ing the sailor trunks and sweaters they had bought in a Nice
back street—garments that afterward ran through a vogue

408 Tender is the Night