Why aren’t you nice like that always?
You can be.”
It seemed fantastic to Dick to be in a position where Mary North could tell him about things.
“Your friends still like you, Dick.
But you say awful things to people when you’ve been drinking.
I’ve spent most of my time defending you this summer.”
“That remark is one of Doctor Eliot’s classics.”
“It’s true.
Nobody cares whether you drink or not—” She hesitated, “even when Abe drank hardest, he never offended people like you do.”
“You’re all so dull,” he said.
“But we’re all there is!” cried Mary.
“If you don’t like nice people, try the ones who aren’t nice, and see how you like that!
All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment.”
“Have I been nourished?” he asked.
Mary was having a good time, though she did not know it, as she had sat down with him only out of fear.
Again she refused a drink and said:
“Self-indulgence is back of it.
Of course, after Abe you can imagine how I feel about it—since I watched the progress of a good man toward alcoholism—”
Down the steps tripped Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers with blithe theatricality.
Dick felt fine—he was already well in advance of the day; arrived at where a man should be at the end of a good dinner, yet he showed only a fine, considered, restrained interest in Mary.
His eyes, for the moment clear as a child’s, asked her sympathy and stealing over him he felt the old necessity of convincing her that he was the last man in the world and she was the last woman.
. . . Then he would not have to look at those two other figures, a man and a woman, black and white and metallic against the sky. . . .
“You once liked me, didn’t you?” he asked.
“LIKED you—I LOVED you.
Everybody loved you.
You could’ve had anybody you wanted for the asking—”
“There has always been something between you and me.”
She bit eagerly.
“Has there, Dick?”
“Always—I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them.”
But the old interior laughter had begun inside him and he knew he couldn’t keep it up much longer.
“I always thought you knew a lot,” Mary said enthusiastically.
“More about me than any one has ever known.
Perhaps that’s why I was so afraid of you when we didn’t get along so well.”
His glance fell soft and kind upon hers, suggesting an emotion underneath; their glances married suddenly, bedded, strained together.
Then, as the laughter inside of him became so loud that it seemed as if Mary must hear it, Dick switched off the light and they were back in the Riviera sun.
“I must go,” he said.
As he stood up he swayed a little; he did not feel well any more—his blood raced slow.
He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace.
Faces turned upward from several umbrellas.
“I’m going to him.”
Nicole got to her knees.
“No, you’re not,” said Tommy, pulling her down firmly.
“Let well enough alone.”
XIII
Nicole kept in touch with Dick after her new marriage; there were letters on business matters, and about the children.
When she said, as she often did,
“I loved Dick and I’ll never forget him,” Tommy answered,
“Of course not—why should you?”
Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success.