Page 411 - tender-is-the-night

Swimming away, Nicole saw that the cloud of Dick’s
heart-sickness had lifted a little as he began to play with
Rosemary, bringing out his old expertness with people, a
tarnished object of art; she guessed that with a drink or so
he would have done his stunts on the swinging rings for her,
fumbling through stunts he had once done with ease. She
noticed that this summer, for the first time, he avoided high
diving.
Later, as she dodged her way from raft to raft, Dick over-
took her.
‘Some of Rosemary’s friends have a speed boat, the one
out there. Do you want to aquaplane? I think it would be
amusing.’
Remembering that once he could stand on his hands on
a chair at the end of a board, she indulged him as she might
have indulged Lanier. Last summer on the Zugersee they
had played at that pleasant water game, and Dick had lifted
a two-hundred-pound man from the board onto his shoul-
ders and stood up. But women marry all their husbands’
talents and naturally, afterwards, are not so impressed with
them as they may keep up the pretense of being. Nicole had
not even pretended to be impressed, though she had said
‘Yes’ to him, and ‘Yes, I thought so too.’
She knew, though, that he was somewhat tired, that it
was only the closeness of Rosemary’s exciting youth that
prompted the impending effort—she had seen him draw
the same inspiration from the new bodies of her children
and she wondered coldly if he would make a spectacle of
himself. The Divers were older than the others in the boat—

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