Page 59 - tender-is-the-night

IX

It was a limpid black night, hung as in a basket from a sin-
gle dull star. The horn of the car ahead was muffled by the
resistance of the thick air. Brady’s chauffeur drove slowly;
the tail-light of the other car appeared from time to time
at turnings—then not at all. But after ten minutes it came
into sight again, drawn up at the side of the road. Brady’s
chauffeur slowed up behind but immediately it began to roll
forward slowly and they passed it. In the instant they passed
it they heard a blur of voices from behind the reticence of
the limousine and saw that the Divers’ chauffeur was grin-
ning. Then they went on, going fast through the alternating
banks of darkness and thin night, descending at last in a
series of roller-coaster swoops, to the great bulk of Gausse’s
hotel.
Rosemary dozed for three hours and then lay awake, sus-
pended in the moonshine. Cloaked by the erotic darkness
she exhausted the future quickly, with all the eventuali-
ties that might lead up to a kiss, but with the kiss itself as
blurred as a kiss in pictures. She changed position in bed
deliberately, the first sign of insomnia she had ever had, and
tried to think with her mother’s mind about the question.
In this process she was often acute beyond her experience,
with remembered things from old conversations that had
gone into her half-heard.

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