Page 437 - tender-is-the-night

satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game.
Yesterday came back to her now in innumerable detail—
detail that began to overlay her memory of similar moments
when her love for Dick was fresh and intact. She began to
slight that love, so that it seemed to have been tinged with
sentimental habit from the first. With the opportunistic
memory of women she scarcely recalled how she had felt
when she and Dick had possessed each other in secret places
around the corners of the world, during the month before
they were married. Just so had she lied to Tommy last night,
swearing to him that never before had she so entirely, so
completely, so utterly... .
... then remorse for this moment of betrayal, which so
cavalierly belittled a decade of her life, turned her walk to-
ward Dick’s sanctuary.
Approaching noiselessly she saw him behind his cottage,
sitting in a steamer chair by the cliff wall, and for a moment
she regarded him silently. He was thinking, he was living a
world completely his own and in the small motions of his
face, the brow raised or lowered, the eyes narrowed or wid-
ened, the lips set and reset, the play of his hands, she saw
him progress from phase to phase of his own story spin-
ning out inside him, his own, not hers. Once he clenched
his fists and leaned forward, once it brought into his face
an expression of torment and despair—when this passed its
stamp lingered in his eyes. For almost the first time in her
life she was sorry for him—it is hard for those who have
once been mentally afflicted to be sorry for those who are
well, and though Nicole often paid lip service to the fact

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