Page 47 - tender-is-the-night

‘I fell in love with you the first time I saw you,’ she said
quietly. He pretended not to have heard, as if the compli-
ment were purely formal.
‘New friends,’ he said, as if it were an important point,
‘can often have a better time together than old friends.’
With that remark, which she did not understand pre-
cisely, she found herself at the table, picked out by slowly
emerging lights against the dark dusk. A chord of delight
struck inside her when she saw that Dick had taken her
mother on his right hand; for herself she was between Luis
Campion and Brady.
Surcharged with her emotion she turned to Brady with
the intention of confiding in him, but at her first mention
of Dick a hard-boiled sparkle in his eyes gave her to un-
derstand that he refused the fatherly office. In turn she
was equally firm when he tried to monopolize her hand,
so they talked shop or rather she listened while he talked
shop, her polite eyes never leaving his face, but her mind
was so definitely elsewhere that she felt he must guess the
fact. Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and
supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the
striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the
first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

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