“Oh, don’t tease me—I’m not a baby.
I know you’re not in love with me.”
She was suddenly humble and quiet.
“I didn’t expect that much.
I know I must seem just nothing to you.”
“Nonsense.
But you seem young to me.”
His thoughts added, “— there’d be so much to teach you.”
Rosemary waited, breathing eagerly till Dick said:
“And lastly things aren’t arranged so that this could be as you want.”
Her face drooped with dismay and disappointment and Dick said automatically,
“We’ll have to simply—” He stopped himself, followed her to the bed, sat down beside her while she wept.
He was suddenly confused, not about the ethics of the matter, for the impossibility of it was sheerly indicated from all angles but simply confused, and for a moment his usual grace, the tensile strength of his balance, was absent.
“I knew you wouldn’t,” she sobbed.
“It was just a forlorn hope.”
He stood up.
“Good night, child.
This is a damn shame.
Let’s drop it out of the picture.”
He gave her two lines of hospital patter to go to sleep on.
“So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too.
That’s an old-fashioned idea, isn’t it?”
She looked up at him as he took a step toward the door; she looked at him without the slightest idea as to what was in his head, she saw him take another step in slow motion, turn and look at her again, and she wanted for a moment to hold him and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him; she saw his hand fall on the doorknob.
Then she gave up and sank back on the bed.
When the door closed she got up and went to the mirror, where she began brushing her hair, sniffling a little.
One hundred and fifty strokes Rosemary gave it, as usual, then a hundred and fifty more.
She brushed it until her arm ached, then she changed arms and went on brushing. . . .
XVI
She woke up cooled and shamed.
The sight of her beauty in the mirror did not reassure her but only awakened the ache of yesterday and a letter, forwarded by her mother, from the boy who had taken her to the Yale prom last fall, which announced his presence in Paris was no help—all that seemed far away.
She emerged from her room for the ordeal of meeting the Divers weighted with a double trouble.
But it was hidden by a sheath as impermeable as Nicole’s when they met and went together to a series of fittings.
It was consoling, though, when Nicole remarked, apropos of a distraught saleswoman:
“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do—they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”
Yesterday in her expansiveness Rosemary would have resented that remark—to-day in her desire to minimize what had happened she welcomed it eagerly.
She admired Nicole for her beauty and her wisdom, and also for the first time in her life she was jealous.
Just before leaving Gausse’s hotel her mother had said in that casual tone, which Rosemary knew concealed her most significant opinions, that Nicole was a great beauty, with the frank implication that Rosemary was not.
This did not bother Rosemary, who had only recently been allowed to learn that she was even personable; so that her prettiness never seemed exactly her own but rather an acquirement, like her French.
Nevertheless, in the taxi she looked at Nicole, matching herself against her.
There were all the potentialities for romantic love in that lovely body and in the delicate mouth, sometimes tight, sometimes expectantly half open to the world.
Nicole had been a beauty as a young girl and she would be a beauty later when her skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones—the essential structure was there.
She had been white-Saxon-blonde but she was more beautiful now that her hair had darkened than when it had been like a cloud and more beautiful than she.
“We lived there,” Rosemary suddenly pointed to a building in the Rue des Saints-Peres.
“That’s strange.
Because when I was twelve Mother and Baby and I once spent a winter there,” and she pointed to a hotel directly across the street.
The two dingy fronts stared at them, gray echoes of girlhood.
“We’d just built our Lake Forest house and we were economizing,” Nicole continued.
“At least Baby and I and the governess economized and Mother travelled.”
“We were economizing too,” said Rosemary, realizing that the word meant different things to them.
“Mother always spoke of it very carefully as a small hotel—” Nicole gave her quick magnetic little laugh, “—I mean instead of saying a ‘cheap’ hotel.