Nicotera followed Rosemary to the car and whispered something to her—she looked at him without smiling as she said good-by.
Dick and Rosemary had luncheon at the Castelli dei C?sari, a splendid restaurant in a high-terraced villa overlooking the ruined forum of an undetermined period of the decadence.
Rosemary took a cocktail and a little wine, and Dick took enough so that his feeling of dissatisfaction left him.
Afterward they drove back to the hotel, all flushed and happy, in a sort of exalted quiet.
She wanted to be taken and she was, and what had begun with a childish infatuation on a beach was accomplished at last.
XXI
Rosemary had another dinner date, a birthday party for a member of the company.
Dick ran into Collis Clay in the lobby, but he wanted to dine alone, and pretended an engagement at the Excelsior.
He drank a cocktail with Collis and his vague dissatisfaction crystallized as impatience—he no longer had an excuse for playing truant to the clinic.
This was less an infatuation than a romantic memory.
Nicole was his girl—too often he was sick at heart about her, yet she was his girl.
Time with Rosemary was self-indulgence— time with Collis was nothing plus nothing.
In the doorway of the Excelsior he ran into Baby Warren.
Her large beautiful eyes, looking precisely like marbles, stared at him with surprise and curiosity.
“I thought you were in America, Dick!
Is Nicole with you?”
“I came back by way of Naples.”
The black band on his arm reminded her to say:
“I’m so sorry to hear of your trouble.”
Inevitably they dined together.
“Tell me about everything,” she demanded.
Dick gave her a version of the facts, and Baby frowned.
She found it necessary to blame some one for the catastrophe in her sister’s life.
“Do you think Doctor Dohmler took the right course with her from the first?”
“There’s not much variety in treatment any more—of course you try to find the right personality to handle a particular case.”
“Dick, I don’t pretend to advise you or to know much about it but don’t you think a change might be good for her—to get out of that atmosphere of sickness and live in the world like other people?”
“But you were keen for the clinic,” he reminded her.
“You told me you’d never feel really safe about her—”
“That was when you were leading that hermit’s life on the Riviera, up on a hill way off from anybody.
I didn’t mean to go back to that life.
I meant, for instance, London.
The English are the best-balanced race in the world.”
“They are not,” he disagreed.
“They are.
I know them, you see.
I meant it might be nice for you to take a house in London for the spring season—I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished.
I mean, living with sane, well-balanced English people.”
She would have gone on to tell him all the old propaganda stories of 1914 if he had not laughed and said:
“I’ve been reading a book by Michael Arlen and if that’s—”
She ruined Michael Arlen with a wave of her salad spoon.
“He only writes about degenerates.
I mean the worthwhile English.”
As she thus dismissed her friends they were replaced in Dick’s mind only by a picture of the alien, unresponsive faces that peopled the small hotels of Europe.
“Of course it’s none of my business,” Baby repeated, as a preliminary to a further plunge, “but to leave her alone in an atmosphere like that—”
“I went to America because my father died.”
“I understand that, I told you how sorry I was.”
She fiddled with the glass grapes on her necklace.
“But there’s so MUCH money now.
Plenty for everything, and it ought to be used to get Nicole well.”
“For one thing I can’t see myself in London.”