“Are you actually a virgin?”
“No-o-o!” she sang.
“I’ve slept with six hundred and forty men—if that’s the answer you want.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Do you want me for a case in psychology?”
“Looking at you as a perfectly normal girl of twenty-two, living in the year nineteen twenty-eight, I guess you’ve taken a few shots at love.”
“It’s all been—abortive,” she said.
Dick couldn’t believe her.
He could not decide whether she was deliberately building a barrier between them or whether this was intended to make an eventual surrender more significant.
“Let’s go walk in the Pincio,” he suggested.
He shook himself straight in his clothes and smoothed his hair.
A moment had come and somehow passed.
For three years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary measured other men and inevitably his stature had increased to heroic size.
She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.
Walking on the greensward between cherubs and philosophers, fauns and falling water, she took his arm snugly, settling into it with a series of little readjustments, as if she wanted it to be right because it was going to be there forever.
She plucked a twig and broke it, but she found no spring in it.
Suddenly seeing what she wanted in Dick’s face she took his gloved hand and kissed it.
Then she cavorted childishly for him until he smiled and she laughed and they began having a good time.
“I can’t go out with you to-night, darling, because I promised some people a long time ago.
But if you’ll get up early I’ll take you out to the set to-morrow.”
He dined alone at the hotel, went to bed early, and met Rosemary in the lobby at half-past six.
Beside him in the car she glowed away fresh and new in the morning sunshine.
They went out through the Porta San Sebastiano and along the Appian Way until they came to the huge set of the forum, larger than the forum itself.
Rosemary turned him over to a man who led him about the great props; the arches and tiers of seats and the sanded arena.
She was working on a stage which represented a guard-room for Christian prisoners, and presently they went there and watched Nicotera, one of many hopeful Valentinos, strut and pose before a dozen female “captives,” their eyes melancholy and startling with mascara.
Rosemary appeared in a knee-length tunic.
“Watch this,” she whispered to Dick.
“I want your opinion.
Everybody that’s seen the rushes says—”
“What are the rushes?”
“When they run off what they took the day before.
They say it’s the first thing I’ve had sex appeal in.”
“I don’t notice it.”
“You wouldn’t!
But I have.”
Nicotera in his leopard skin talked attentively to Rosemary while the electrician discussed something with the director, meanwhile leaning on him.
Finally the director pushed his hand off roughly and wiped a sweating forehead, and Dick’s guide remarked:
“He’s on the hop again, and how!”
“Who?” asked Dick, but before the man could answer the director walked swiftly over to them.
“Who’s on the hop—you’re on the hop yourself.”
He spoke vehemently to Dick, as if to a jury.
“When he’s on the hop he always thinks everybody else is, and how!”
He glared at the guide a moment longer, then he clapped his hands:
“All right—everybody on the set.”
It was like visiting a great turbulent family.
An actress approached Dick and talked to him for five minutes under the impression that he was an actor recently arrived from London.
Discovering her mistake she scuttled away in panic.
The majority of the company felt either sharply superior or sharply inferior to the world outside, but the former feeling prevailed.
They were people of bravery and industry; they were risen to a position of prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained.
The session ended as the light grew misty—a fine light for painters, but, for the camera, not to be compared with the clear California air.