Page 442 - tender-is-the-night

her assistance. Mary Minghetti was in a condition of panic
and collapse—she literally flung herself at Dick’s stomach
as though that were the point of greatest association, im-
ploring him to do something. Meanwhile the chief of police
explained the matter to Gausse who listened to each word
with reluctance, divided between being properly apprecia-
tive of the officer’s narrative gift and showing that, as the
perfect servant, the story had no shocking effect on him. ‘It
was merely a lark,’ said Lady Caroline with scorn. ‘We were
pretending to be sailors on leave, and we picked up two silly
girls. They got the wind up and made a rotten scene in a
lodging house.’
Dick nodded gravely, looking at the stone floor, like a
priest in the confessional—he was torn between a tenden-
cy to ironic laughter and another tendency to order fifty
stripes of the cat and a fortnight of bread and water. The
lack, in Lady Caroline’s face, of any sense of evil, except the
evil wrought by cowardly Provençal girls and stupid police,
confounded him; yet he had long concluded that certain
classes of English people lived upon a concentrated essence
of the anti-social that, in comparison, reduced the gorgings
of New York to something like a child contracting indiges-
tion from ice cream.
‘I’ve got to get out before Hosain hears about this,’ Mary
pleaded. ‘Dick, you can always arrange things—you always
could. Tell ‘em we’ll go right home, tell ‘em we’ll pay any-
thing.’
‘I shall not,’ said Lady Caroline disdainfully. ‘Not a shil-
ling. But I shall jolly well find out what the Consulate in

442 Tender is the Night