“This is not as it should be,” Dick deliberated. “Isn’t it just the champagne? Let’s more or less forget it.”
“Oh, no, NOW. I want you to do it now, take me, show me, I’m absolutely yours and I want to be.”
“For one thing, have you thought how much it would hurt Nicole?”
“She won’t know—this won’t have anything to do with her.”
He continued kindly.
“Then there’s the fact that I love Nicole.”
“But you can love more than just one person, can’t you? Like I love Mother and I love you—more. I love you more now.”
“—the fourth place you’re not in love with me but you might be afterwards, and that would begin your life with a terrible mess.”
“No, I promise I’ll never see you again. I’ll get Mother and go to America right away.”
He dismissed this. He was remembering too vividly the youth and freshness of her lips. He took another tone.
“You’re just in that mood.”
“Oh, please, I don’t care even if I had a baby. I could go into Mexico like a girl at the studio. Oh, this is so different from anything I ever thought—I used to hate it when they kissed me seriously.” He saw she was still under the impression that it must happen. “Some of them had great big teeth, but you’re all different and beautiful. I want you to do it.”
“I believe you think people just kiss some way and you want me to kiss you.”
“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-Péres.
“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. If any swanky friends asked us our address we’d never say, ‘We’re in a dingy little hole over in the apache quarter where we’re glad of running water,’—we’d say ‘We’re in a small hotel.’ As if all the big ones were too noisy and vulgar for us. Of course the friends always saw through us and told everyone about it, but Mother always said it showed we knew our way around Europe. She did, of course: she was born a German citizen. But her mother was American, and she was brought up in Chicago, and she was more American than European.”
They were meeting the others in two minutes, and Rosemary reconstructed herself once more as they got out of the taxi in the Rue Guynemer, across from the LuxembourgGardens. They were lunching in the Norths’ already dismantled apartment high above the green mass of leaves. The day seemed different to Rosemary from the day before—When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her. She felt wildly happy, felt the warm sap of emotion being pumped through her body. A cool, clear confidence deepened and sang in her. She scarcely looked at Dick but she knew everything was all right.
After luncheon the Divers and the Norths and Rosemary went to the Franco-American Films, to be joined by Collis Clay, her young man from New Haven, to whom she had telephoned. He was a Georgian, with the peculiarly regular, even stencilled ideas of Southerners who are educated in the North. Last winter she had thought him attractive—once they held hands in an automobile going from New Haven to New York; now he no longer existed for her.
In the projection room she sat between Collis Clay and Dick while the mechanic mounted the reels of Daddy’s Girl and a French executive fluttered about her trying to talk American slang. “Yes, boy,” he said when there was trouble with the projector, “I have not any benenas.” Then the lights went out, there was the sudden click and a flickering noise and she was alone with Dick at last. They looked at each other in the half darkness.