Page 454 - tender-is-the-night

Then he decided to leave his bags by the station in Cannes
and take a last look at Gausse’s Beach.
The beach was peopled with only an advance guard of
children when Nicole and her sister arrived that morning.
A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed over
a windless day. Waiters were putting extra ice into the bar;
an American photographer from the A. and P. worked with
his equipment in a precarious shade and looked up quickly
at every footfall descending the stone steps. At the hotel his
prospective subjects slept late in darkened rooms upon their
recent opiate of dawn.
When Nicole started out on the beach she saw Dick, not
dressed for swimming, sitting on a rock above. She shrank
back in the shadow of her dressing-tent. In a minute Baby
joined her, saying:
‘Dick’s still there.’
‘I saw him.’
‘I think he might have the delicacy to go.’
‘This is his place—in a way, he discovered it. Old Gausse
always says he owes everything to Dick.’
Baby looked calmly at her sister.
‘We should have let him confine himself to his bicycle
excursions,’ she remarked. ‘When people are taken out of
their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming
a bluff they put up.’
‘Dick was a good husband to me for six years,’ Nicole
said. ‘All that time I never suffered a minute’s pain because
of him, and he always did his best never to let anything hurt
me.’

454 Tender is the Night