Page 81 - tender-is-the-night

know whether she was attracted or repelled, but only that
she was deeply moved. It made her feel very alone as she
went back into the restaurant, but it was touching to look
in upon, and the passionate gratitude of Nicole’s ‘Oh, DO
I!’ echoed in her mind. The particular mood of the passage
she had witnessed lay ahead of her; but however far she was
from it her stomach told her it was all right—she had none
of the aversion she had felt in the playing of certain love
scenes in pictures.
Being far away from it she nevertheless irrevocably par-
ticipated in it now, and shopping with Nicole she was much
more conscious of the assignation than Nicole herself. She
looked at Nicole in a new way, estimating her attractions.
Certainly she was the most attractive woman Rosemary had
ever met—with her hardness, her devotions and loyalties,
and a certain elusiveness, which Rosemary, thinking now
through her mother’s middle-class mind, associated with
her attitude about money. Rosemary spent money she had
earned—she was here in Europe due to the fact that she had
gone in the pool six times that January day with her tem-
perature roving from 99° in the early morning to 103°, when
her mother stopped it.
With Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and
two hats and four pairs of shoes with her money. Nicole
bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the
things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that
she couldn’t possibly use herself, she bought as a present for
a friend. She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions,
artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds,

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