“She’s very—very pretty,” Nicole said in a detached, emphatic way, “and I thought she was very good in the picture.”
“She was well directed.
Thinking it over, it wasn’t very individual.”
“I thought it was.
I can see how she’d be very attractive to men.”
His heart twisted.
To what men?
How many men?
—Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
—Please do, it’s too light in here.
Where now?
And with whom?
“In a few years she’ll look ten years older than you.”
“On the contrary.
I sketched her one night on a theatre program, I think she’ll last.”
They were both restless in the night.
In a day or two Dick would try to banish the ghost of Rosemary before it became walled up with them, but for the moment he had no force to do it.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.
This was more difficult because he was currently annoyed with Nicole, who, after all these years, should recognize symptoms of strain in herself and guard against them.
Twice within a fortnight she had broken up: there had been the night of the dinner at Tarmes when he had found her in her bedroom dissolved in crazy laughter telling Mrs. McKisco she could not go in the bathroom because the key was thrown down the well.
Mrs. McKisco was astonished and resentful, baffled and yet in a way comprehending.
Dick had not been particularly alarmed then, for afterward Nicole was repentant.
She called at Gausse’s Hotel but the McKiscos were gone.
The collapse in Paris was another matter, adding significance to the first one.
It prophesied possibly a new cycle, a new pousse of the malady.
Having gone through unprofessional agonies during her long relapse following Topsy’s birth, he had, perforce, hardened himself about her, making a cleavage between Nicole sick and Nicole well.
This made it difficult now to distinguish between his self- protective professional detachment and some new coldness in his heart.
As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect.
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.
There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.
The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye.
We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
XII
He found Nicole in the garden with her arms folded high on her shoulders.
She looked at him with straight gray eyes, with a child’s searching wonder.
“I went to Cannes,” he said.
“I ran into Mrs. Speers.
She’s leaving to-morrow.
She wanted to come up and say good-by to you, but I slew the idea.”
“I’m sorry.
I’d like to have seen her.
I like her.”
“Who else do you think I saw—Bartholomew Tailor.”
“You didn’t.”
“I couldn’t have missed that face of his, the old experienced weasel.
He was looking over the ground for Ciro’s Menagerie— they’ll all be down next year.
I suspected Mrs. Abrams was a sort of outpost.”
“And Baby was outraged the first summer we came here.”
“They don’t really give a damn where they are, so I don’t see why they don’t stay and freeze in Deauville.”
“Can’t we start rumors about cholera or something?”