Tommy faced Dick, saying: “I think Nicole wants a divorce—I suppose you’ll make no obstacles?”

A troupe of fifty more swarmed after the first bicycle racers, strung out over two hundred yards; a few were smiling and self- conscious, a few obviously exhausted, most of them indifferent and weary. A retinue of small boys passed, a few defiant stragglers, a light truck carried the dupes of accident and defeat. They were back at the table. Nicole wanted Dick to take the initiative, but he seemed content to sit with his face half-shaved matching her hair half-washed.

“Isn’t it true you’re not happy with me any more?” Nicole continued. “Without me you could get to your work again—you could work better if you didn’t worry about me.”

Tommy moved impatiently.

“That is so useless. Nicole and I love each other, that’s all there is to it.”

“Well, then,” said the Doctor, “since it’s all settled, suppose we go back to the barber shop.”

Tommy wanted a row: “There are several points—”

“Nicole and I will talk things over,” said Dick equitably. “Don’t worry—I agree in principal, and Nicole and I understand each other. There’s less chance of unpleasantness if we avoid a three- cornered discussion.”

Unwillingly acknowledging Dick’s logic, Tommy was moved by an irresistible racial tendency to chisel for an advantage.

“Let it be understood that from this moment,” he said, “I stand in the position of Nicole’s protector until details can be arranged. And I shall hold you strictly accountable for any abuse of the fact that you continue to inhabit the same house.”

“I never did go in for making love to dry loins,” said Dick.

He nodded, and walked off toward the hotel with Nicole’s whitest eyes following him.

“He was fair enough,” Tommy conceded. “Darling, will we be together to-night?”

“I suppose so.”

So it had happened—and with a minimum of drama; Nicole felt outguessed, realizing that from the episode of the camphor-rub, Dick had anticipated everything. But also she felt happy and excited, and the odd little wish that she could tell Dick all about it faded quickly. But her eyes followed his figure until it became a dot and mingled with the other dots in the summer crowd.

Tender is the Night

XII

The day before Doctor Diver left the Riviera he spent all his time with his children. He was not young any more with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have about himself, so he wanted to remember them well. The children had been told that this winter they would be with their aunt in London and that soon they were going to come and see him in America. Fräulein was not to be discharged without his consent.

He was glad he had given so much to the little girl—about the boy he was more uncertain—always he had been uneasy about what he had to give to the ever-climbing, ever-clinging, breast-searching young. But, when he said good-by to them, he wanted to lift their beautiful heads off their necks and hold them close for hours.

He embraced the old gardener who had made the first garden at Villa Diana six years ago; he kissed the Provençal girl who helped with the children. She had been with them for almost a decade and she fell on her knees and cried until Dick jerked her to her feet and gave her three hundred francs. Nicole was sleeping late, as had been agreed upon—he left a note for her, and one for Baby Warren who was just back from Sardinia and staying at the house. Dick took a big drink from a bottle of brandy three feet high, holding ten quarts, that some one had presented them with.

Then he decided to leave his bags by the station in Cannes and take a last look at Gausse’s Beach.

The beach was peopled with only an advance guard of children when Nicole and her sister arrived that morning. A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed over a windless day. Waiters were putting extra ice into the bar; an American photographer from the A. and P. worked with his equipment in a precarious shade and looked up quickly at every footfall descending the stone steps. At the hotel his prospective subjects slept late in darkened rooms upon their recent opiate of dawn.

When Nicole started out on the beach she saw Dick, not dressed for swimming, sitting on a rock above. She shrank back in the shadow of her dressing-tent. In a minute Baby joined her, saying:

“Dick’s still there.”

“I saw him.”

“I think he might have the delicacy to go.”

“This is his place—in a way, he discovered it. Old Gausse always says he owes everything to Dick.”

Baby looked calmly at her sister.

“We should have let him confine himself to his bicycle excursions,” she remarked. “When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.”

“Dick was a good husband to me for six years,” Nicole said. “All that time I never suffered a minute’s pain because of him, and he always did his best never to let anything hurt me.”

Baby’s lower jaw projected slightly as she said:

“That’s what he was educated for.”

The sisters sat in silence; Nicole wondering in a tired way about things; Baby considering whether or not to marry the latest candidate for her hand and money, an authenticated Hapsburg. She was not quite THINKING about it. Her affairs had long shared such a sameness, that, as she dried out, they were more important for their conversational value than for themselves. Her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them.