Page 52 - tender-is-the-night

over before it could be irreverently breathed, before they
had half realized it was there.
But the diffused magic of the hot sweet South had with-
drawn into them—the soft-pawed night and the ghostly
wash of the Mediterranean far below—the magic left these
things and melted into the two Divers and became part of
them. Rosemary watched Nicole pressing upon her moth-
er a yellow evening bag she had admired, saying, ‘I think
things ought to belong to the people that like them’—and
then sweeping into it all the yellow articles she could find,
a pencil, a lipstick, a little note book, ‘because they all go
together.’
Nicole disappeared and presently Rosemary noticed that
Dick was no longer there; the guests distributed themselves
in the garden or drifted in toward the terrace.
‘Do you want,’ Violet McKisco asked Rosemary, ‘to go to
the bathroom?’
Not at that precise moment.
‘I want,’ insisted Mrs. McKisco, ‘to go to the bathroom.’
As a frank outspoken woman she walked toward the house,
dragging her secret after her, while Rosemary looked after
with reprobation. Earl Brady proposed that they walk down
to the sea wall but she felt that this was her time to have a
share of Dick Diver when he reappeared, so she stalled, lis-
tening to McKisco quarrel with Barban.
‘Why do you want to fight the Soviets?’ McKisco said.
‘The greatest experiment ever made by humanity? And the
Riff? It seems to me it would be more heroic to fight on the
just side.’

52 Tender is the Night