Does that satisfy your logical mind?”
He scarcely seemed to know what she was talking about.
“Where’s Dick—is he lunching with us?”
Seeing that his remark had meant comparatively little to him she suddenly laughed away its effect.
“Dick’s on a tour,” she said.
“Rosemary Hoyt turned up, and either they’re together or she upset him so much that he wants to go away and dream about her.”
“You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”
“Oh no,” she assured him hastily.
“No, I’m not really—I’m just a— I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.”
Marius brought out melon and an ice pail, and Nicole, thinking irresistibly about her crook’s eyes did not answer; he gave one an entire nut to crack, this man, instead of giving it in fragments to pick at for meat.
“Why didn’t they leave you in your natural state?” Tommy demanded presently.
“You are the most dramatic person I have known.”
She had no answer.
“All this taming of women!” he scoffed.
“In any society there are certain—” She felt Dick’s ghost prompting at her elbow but she subsided at Tommy’s overtone:
“I’ve brutalized many men into shape but I wouldn’t take a chance on half the number of women.
Especially this ‘kind’ bullying—what good does it do anybody?—you or him or anybody?”
Her heart leaped and then sank faintly with a sense of what she owed Dick.
“I suppose I’ve got—”
“You’ve got too much money,” he said impatiently.
“That’s the crux of the matter.
Dick can’t beat that.”
She considered while the melons were removed.
“What do you think I ought to do?”
For the first time in ten years she was under the sway of a personality other than her husband’s.
Everything Tommy said to her became part of her forever.
They drank the bottle of wine while a faint wind rocked the pine needles and the sensuous heat of early afternoon made blinding freckles on the checkered luncheon cloth.
Tommy came over behind her and laid his arms along hers, clasping her hands.
Their cheeks touched and then their lips and she gasped half with passion for him, half with the sudden surprise of its force. . . .
“Can’t you send the governess and the children away for the afternoon?”
“They have a piano lesson.
Anyhow I don’t want to stay here.”
“Kiss me again.”
A little later, riding toward Nice, she thought: So I have white crook’s eyes, have I?
Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.
His assertion seemed to absolve her from all blame or responsibility and she had a thrill of delight in thinking of herself in a new way.
New vistas appeared ahead, peopled with the faces of many men, none of whom she need obey or even love.
She drew in her breath, hunched her shoulders with a wriggle and turned to Tommy.
“Have we GOT to go all the way to your hotel at Monte Carlo?”
He brought the car to a stop with a squeak of tires.
“No!” he answered.
“And, my God, I have never been so happy as I am this minute.”
They had passed through Nice following the blue coast and begun to mount to the middling-high Corniche.
Now Tommy turned sharply down to the shore, ran out a blunt peninsula, and stopped in the rear of a small shore hotel.
Its tangibility frightened Nicole for a moment.
At the desk an American was arguing interminably with the clerk about the rate of exchange.
She hovered, outwardly tranquil but inwardly miserable, as Tommy filled out the police blanks—his real, hers false.
Their room was a Mediterranean room, almost ascetic, almost clean, darkened to the glare of the sea.
Simplest of pleasures—simplest of places.
Tommy ordered two cognacs, and when the door closed behind the waiter, he sat in the only chair, dark, scarred and handsome, his eyebrows arched and upcurling, a fighting Puck, an earnest Satan.