Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald

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
Luxembourg
Gardens
. 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.
    “Dear
Rosemary,” he murmured. Their shoulders touched. Nicole stirred restlessly at
the end of the row and Abe coughed convulsively and blew his nose; then they
all settled down and the picture ran.
    There
she was—the school girl of a year ago, hair down her back and rippling out
stiffly like the solid hair of a tanagra figure;
there she was—SO young and innocent—the product of her mother’s loving care;
there she was—embodying all the immaturity of the race, cutting a new cardboard
paper doll to pass before its empty harlot’s mind. She remembered how she had
felt in that dress, especially fresh and new under the fresh young silk.
    Daddy’s girl. Was it a ‘itty-bitty bravekins and did it suffer? Ooo - ooo -tweet,
de tweetest thing, wasn’t she dest too tweet? Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away;
nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitable became evitable, syllogism,
dialectic, all rationality fell away. Women would forget the dirty dishes at
home and weep, even within the picture one woman wept so long that she almost
stole the film away from Rosemary. She wept all over a set that cost a