Page 49 - tender-is-the-night

to have been friendly and interested would have seemed to
reflect on the Divers, so now they were all trying, and seeing
this, Rosemary liked everyone—except McKisco, who had
contrived to be the unassimilated member of the party. This
was less from ill will than from his determination to sustain
with wine the good spirits he had enjoyed on his arrival. Ly-
ing back in his place between Earl Brady, to whom he had
addressed several withering remarks about the movies, and
Mrs. Abrams, to whom he said nothing, he stared at Dick
Diver with an expression of devastating irony, the effect be-
ing occasionally interrupted by his attempts to engage Dick
in a cater-cornered conversation across the table.
‘Aren’t you a friend of Van Buren Denby?’ he would say.
‘I don’t believe I know him.’
‘I thought you were a friend of his,’ he persisted irrita-
bly.
When the subject of Mr. Denby fell of its own weight,
he essayed other equally irrelative themes, but each time
the very deference of Dick’s attention seemed to paralyze
him, and after a moment’s stark pause the conversation
that he had interrupted would go on without him. He tried
breaking into other dialogues, but it was like continually
shaking hands with a glove from which the hand had been
withdrawn—so finally, with a resigned air of being among
children, he devoted his attention entirely to the cham-
pagne.
Rosemary’s glance moved at intervals around the table,
eager for the others’ enjoyment, as if they were her future
stepchildren. A gracious table light, emanating from a bowl

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