Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut—go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience.
Wound yourself or him— whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl.”
Rosemary had never done much thinking, save about the illimitability of her mother’s perfections, so this final severance of the umbilical cord disturbed her sleep.
A false dawn sent the sky pressing through the tall French windows, and getting up she walked out on the terrace, warm to her bare feet.
There were secret noises in the air, an insistent bird achieved an ill-natured triumph with regularity in the trees above the tennis court; footfalls followed a round drive in the rear of the hotel, taking their tone in turn from the dust road, the crushed-stone walk, the cement steps, and then reversing the process in going away.
Beyond the inky sea and far up that high, black shadow of a hill lived the Divers.
She thought of them both together, heard them still singing faintly a song like rising smoke, like a hymn, very remote in time and far away.
Their children slept, their gate was shut for the night.
She went inside and dressing in a light gown and espadrilles went out her window again and along the continuous terrace toward the front door, going fast since she found that other private rooms, exuding sleep, gave upon it.
She stopped at the sight of a figure seated on the wide white stairway of the formal entrance—then she saw that it was Luis Campion and that he was weeping.
He was weeping hard and quietly and shaking in the same parts as a weeping woman.
A scene in a role she had played last year swept over her irresistibly and advancing she touched him on the shoulder.
He gave a little yelp before he recognized her.
“What is it?”
Her eyes were level and kind and not slanted into him with hard curiosity.
“Can I help you?”
“Nobody can help me.
I knew it.
I have only myself to blame.
It’s always the same.”
“What is it—do you want to tell me?”
He looked at her to see.
“No,” he decided.
“When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer.
The agony.
It’s better to be cold and young than to love.
It’s happened to me before but never like this—so accidental—just when everything was going well.”
His face was repulsive in the quickening light.
Not by a flicker of her personality, a movement of the smallest muscle, did she betray her sudden disgust with whatever it was. But Campion’s sensitivity realized it and he changed the subject rather suddenly.
“Abe North is around here somewhere.”
“Why, he’s staying at the Divers’!”
“Yes, but he’s up—don’t you know what happened?”
A shutter opened suddenly in a room two stories above and an English voice spat distinctly:
“Will you kaindlay stup tucking!”
Rosemary and Luis Campion went humbly down the steps and to a bench beside the road to the beach.
“Then you have no idea what’s happened?
My dear, the most extraordinary thing—” He was warming up now, hanging on to his revelation.
“I’ve never seen a thing come so suddenly—I have always avoided violent people—they upset me so I sometimes have to go to bed for days.”
He looked at her triumphantly.
She had no idea what he was talking about.
“My dear,” he burst forth, leaning toward her with his whole body as he touched her on the upper leg, to show it was no mere irresponsible venture of his hand—he was so sure of himself.
“There’s going to be a duel.”
“Wh-at?”
“A duel with—we don’t know what yet.”
“Who’s going to duel?”
“I’ll tell you from the beginning.”
He drew a long breath and then said, as if it were rather to her discredit but he wouldn’t hold it against her.
“Of course, you were in the other automobile.
Well, in a way you were lucky—I lost at least two years of my life, it came so suddenly.”
“What came?” she demanded.