Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald Page B

hair.
    “We’ll
stay just five minutes,” he decided. “You’re not going to like these people.”
    She
assumed that they were dull and stereotyped people, or gross and drunken
people, or tiresome, insistent people, or any of the sorts of people that the
Divers avoided. She was entirely unprepared for the impression that the scene
made on her.

 
 

     
    XVII
    It was a
house hewn from the frame of Cardinal de Retz’s palace in the Rue Monsieur, but
once inside the door there was nothing of the past, nor of any present that
Rosemary knew. The outer shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose the
future so that it was an electric-like shock, a definite nervous experience,
perverted as a breakfast of oatmeal and hashish, to cross that threshold, if it
could be so called, into the long hall of blue steel,
silver-gilt, and the myriad facets of many oddly bevelled mirrors. The effect was unlike that of any part of the Decorative Arts
Exhibition—for there were people IN it, not in front of it. Rosemary had the
detached false-and-exalted feeling of being on a set and she guessed that every one else present had that feeling too.
    There
were about thirty people, mostly women, and all fashioned by Louisa M. Alcott
or Madame de Ségur ; and they functioned on this set
as cautiously, as precisely, as does a human hand picking up jagged broken
glass. Neither individually nor as a crowd could they be said to dominate the
environment, as one comes to dominate a work of art he may possess, no matter
how esoteric, no one knew what this room meant because it was evolving into
something else, becoming everything a room was not; to exist in it was as
difficult as walking on a highly polished moving stairway, and no one could
succeed at all save with the aforementioned qualities of a hand moving among
broken glass—which qualities limited and defined the majority of those present.
    These
were of two sorts. There were the Americans and English who had been
dissipating all spring and summer, so that now everything they did had a purely
nervous inspiration. They were very quiet and lethargic at certain hours and
then they exploded into sudden quarrels and breakdowns and seductions. The
other class, who might be called the exploiters, was formed by the sponges, who
were sober, serious people by comparison, with a purpose in life and no time
for fooling. These kept their balance best in that environment, and what tone
there was, beyond the apartment’s novel organization of light values, came from
them.
    The
Frankenstein took down Dick and Rosemary at a gulp—it separated them
immediately and Rosemary suddenly discovered herself to be an insincere little
person, living all in the upper registers of her throat and wishing the
director would come. There was however such a wild beating of wings in the room
that she did not feel her position was more incongruous than any one else’s. In addition, her training told and after a
series of semi-military turns, shifts, and marches she found herself presumably
talking to a neat, slick girl with a lovely boy’s face, but actually absorbed
by a conversation taking place on a sort of gun-metal ladder diagonally opposite
her and four feet away.
    There
was a trio of young women sitting on the bench. They were all tall and slender
with small heads groomed like manikins’ heads, and as they talked the heads
waved gracefully about above their dark tailored suits, rather like
long-stemmed flowers and rather like cobras’ hoods.
    “Oh,
they give a good show,” said one of them, in a deep rich voice. “Practically
the best show in
Paris
—I’d
be the last one to deny that. But after all—” She sighed. “Those phrases he
uses over and over—‘Oldest inhabitant gnawed by rodents.’ You laugh once.”
    “I
prefer people whose lives have more corrugated surfaces,” said the second, “and
I don’t like her.”
    “I’ve
never really been able