Page 409 - tender-is-the-night

in silk among the Paris couturiers, remembering the simple
little French girls climbing on the breakwaters crying ‘Dites
donc! Dites donc!’ like birds, and the ritual of the morning
time, the quiet restful extraversion toward sea and sun—
many inventions of his, buried deeper than the sand under
the span of so few years... .
Now the swimming place was a ‘club,’ though, like the
international society it represented, it would be hard to say
who was not admitted.
Nicole hardened again as Dick knelt on the straw mat
and looked about for Rosemary. Her eyes followed his,
searching among the new paraphernalia, the trapezes over
the water, the swinging rings, the portable bathhouses, the
floating towers, the searchlights from last night’s fêtes, the
modernistic buffet, white with a hackneyed motif of endless
handlebars.
The water was almost the last place he looked for Rose-
mary, because few people swam any more in that blue
paradise, children and one exhibitionistic valet who punc-
tuated the morning with spectacular dives from a fifty-foot
rock—most of Gausse’s guests stripped the concealing paja-
mas from their flabbiness only for a short hangover dip at
one o’clock.
‘There she is,’ Nicole remarked.
She watched Dick’s eyes following Rosemary’s track
from raft to raft; but the sigh that rocked out of her bosom
was something left over from five years ago.
‘Let’s swim out and speak to Rosemary,’ he suggested.
‘You go.’

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