Page 69 - tender-is-the-night

but I don’t think Violet would ever respect me again.’
‘Yes, she would,’ said Rosemary. ‘She’d respect you
more.’
‘No—you don’t know Violet. She’s very hard when she
gets an advantage over you. We’ve been married twelve
years, we had a little girl seven years old and she died and
after that you know how it is. We both played around on the
side a little, nothing serious but drifting apart—she called
me a coward out there tonight.’
Troubled, Rosemary didn’t answer.
‘Well, we’ll see there’s as little damage done as possible,’
said Abe. He opened the leather case. ‘These are Barban’s
duelling pistols—I borrowed them so you could get famil-
iar with them. He carries them in his suitcase.’ He weighed
one of the archaic weapons in his hand. Rosemary gave an
exclamation of uneasiness and McKisco looked at the pis-
tols anxiously.
‘Well—it isn’t as if we were going to stand up and pot
each other with forty-fives,’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ said Abe cruelly; ‘the idea is you can sight
better along a long barrel.’
‘How about distance?’ asked McKisco.
‘I’ve inquired about that. If one or the other parties has to
be definitely eliminated they make it eight paces, if they’re
just good and sore it’s twenty paces, and if it’s only to vindi-
cate their honor it’s forty paces. His second agreed with me
to make it forty.’
‘That’s good.’
‘There’s a wonderful duel in a novel of Pushkin’s,’ recol-

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