“Yes, I’ll look. More new people—oh, that girl—yes. Who did you say she looked like. . . . No, I haven’t, we don’t get much chance to see the new American pictures over here. Rosemary who? Well, we’re getting very fashionable for July—seems very peculiar to me. Yes, she’s lovely, but there can be too many people.”

XI

Doctor Richard Diver and Mrs. Elsie Speers sat in the Café des Alliées in August, under cool and dusty trees. The sparkle of the mica was dulled by the baked ground, and a few gusts of mistral from down the coast seeped through the Esterel and rocked the fishing boats in the harbor, pointing the masts here and there at a featureless sky.

“I had a letter this morning,” said Mrs. Speers. “What a terrible time you all must have had with those Negroes! But Rosemary said you were perfectly wonderful to her.”

“Rosemary ought to have a service stripe. It was pretty harrowing— the only person it didn’t disturb was Abe North—he flew off to Havre—he probably doesn’t know about it yet.”

“I’m sorry Mrs. Diver was upset,” she said carefully.

Rosemary had written:

Nicole seemed Out of her Mind. I didn’t want to come South with them because I felt Dick had enough on his hands.

“She’s all right now.” He spoke almost impatiently. “So you’re leaving to-morrow. When will you sail?”

“Right away.”

“My God, it’s awful to have you go.”

“We’re glad we came here. We’ve had a good time, thanks to you. You’re the first man Rosemary ever cared for.”

Another gust of wind strained around the porphyry hills of la Napoule. There was a hint in the air that the earth was hurrying on toward other weather; the lush midsummer moment outside of time was already over.

“Rosemary’s had crushes but sooner or later she always turned the man over to me—” Mrs. Speers laughed, “—for dissection.”

“So I was spared.”

“There was nothing I could have done. She was in love with you before I ever saw you. I told her to go ahead.”

He saw that no provision had been made for him, or for Nicole, in Mrs. Speers’ plans—and he saw that her amorality sprang from the conditions of her own withdrawal. It was her right, the pension on which her own emotions had retired. Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.” So long as the shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Speers could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch. She had not even allowed for the possibility of Rosemary’s being damaged—or was she certain that she couldn’t be?

“If what you say is true I don’t think it did her any harm.” He was keeping up to the end the pretense that he could still think objectively about Rosemary. “She’s over it already. Still—so many of the important times in life begin by seeming incidental.”

“This wasn’t incidental,” Mrs. Speers insisted. “You were the first man—you’re an ideal to her. In every letter she says that.”

“She’s so polite.”

“You and Rosemary are the politest people I’ve ever known, but she means this.”

“My politeness is a trick of the heart.”

This was partly true. From his father Dick had learned the somewhat conscious good manners of the young Southerner coming north after the Civil War. Often he used them and just as often he despised them because they were not a protest against how unpleasant selfishness was but against how unpleasant it looked.

“I’m in love with Rosemary,” he told her suddenly. “It’s a kind of self-indulgence saying that to you.”

It seemed very strange and official to him, as if the very tables and chairs in the Café des Alliées would remember it forever. Already he felt her absence from these skies: on the beach he could only remember the sun-torn flesh of her shoulder; at Tarmes he crushed out her footprints as he crossed the garden; and now the orchestra launching into the Nice Carnival Song, an echo of last year’s vanished gaieties, started the little dance that went on all about her. In a hundred hours she had come to possess all the world’s dark magic; the blinding belladonna, the caffein converting physical into nervous energy, the mandragora that imposes harmony.

With an effort he once more accepted the fiction that he shared Mrs. Speers’ detachment.

“You and Rosemary aren’t really alike,” he said. “The wisdom she got from you is all molded up into her persona, into the mask she faces the world with. She doesn’t think; her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical.”

Mrs. Speers knew too that Rosemary, for all her delicate surface, was a young mustang, perceptibly by Captain Doctor Hoyt, U.S.A. Cross-sectioned, Rosemary would have displayed an enormous heart, liver and soul, all crammed close together under the lovely shell.

Saying good-by, Dick was aware of Elsie Speers’ full charm, aware that she meant rather more to him than merely a last unwillingly relinquished fragment of Rosemary. He could possibly have made up Rosemary—he could never have made up her mother. If the cloak, spurs and brilliants in which Rosemary had walked off were things with which he had endowed her, it was nice in contrast to watch her mother’s grace knowing it was surely something he had not evoked. She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.