Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald

blowing as he joked with
her good-humoredly.
    “You
don’t know what you want. You go and ask your mother what you want.”
    She was
stricken. She touched him, feeling the smooth cloth of his dark coat like a
chasuble. She seemed about to fall to her knees— from that position she delivered
her last shot.
    “I think
you’re the most wonderful person I ever met—except my mother.”
    “You
have romantic eyes.”
    His
laughter swept them on up toward the terrace where he delivered her to Nicole.
. . .
    Too soon
it had become time to go and the Divers helped them all to go quickly. In the
Divers’ big Isotta there would be Tommy Barban and his baggage—he was spending the night at the
hotel to catch an early train—with Mrs. Abrams, the McKiscos and Campion. Earl Brady was going to drop Rosemary and her mother on his way to
Monte Carlo
,
and Royal Dumphry rode with them because the Divers’
car was crowded. Down in the garden lanterns still glowed over the table where
they had dined, as the Divers stood side by side in the gate, Nicole blooming
away and filling the night with graciousness, and Dick bidding good-by to
everyone by name. To Rosemary it seemed very poignant to drive away and leave
them in their house. Again she wondered what Mrs. McKisco had seen in the bathroom.
    IX
    It was a
limpid black night, hung as in a basket from a single dull star. The horn of
the car ahead was muffled by the resistance of the thick air. Brady’s chauffeur
drove slowly; the tail-light of the other car appeared from time to time at
turnings—then not at all. But after ten minutes it came into sight again, drawn
up at the side of the road. Brady’s chauffeur slowed up behind but immediately
it began to roll forward slowly and they passed it. In the instant they passed
it they heard a blur of voices from behind the reticence of the limousine and
saw that the Divers’ chauffeur was grinning. Then they went on, going fast
through the alternating banks of darkness and thin night, descending at last in
a series of roller-coaster swoops, to the great bulk of Gausse’s hotel.
    Rosemary
dozed for three hours and then lay awake, suspended in the moonshine. Cloaked
by the erotic darkness she exhausted the future quickly, with all the
eventualities that might lead up to a kiss, but with the kiss itself as blurred
as a kiss in pictures. She changed position in bed deliberately, the first sign
of insomnia she had ever had, and tried to think with her mother’s mind about
the question. In this process she was often acute beyond her experience, with
remembered things from old conversations that had gone into her half-heard.
    Rosemary
had been brought up with the idea of work. Mrs. Speers had spent the slim
leavings of the men who had widowed her on her daughter’s education, and when
she blossomed out at sixteen with that extraordinary hair, rushed her to
Aix-les- Bains and marched her unannounced into the
suite of an American producer who was recuperating there. When the producer
went to
New York
they went too. Thus Rosemary had passed her entrance examinations. With the
ensuing success and the promise of comparative stability that followed, Mrs.
Speers had felt free to tacitly imply tonight:
    “You
were brought up to work—not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first
nut to crack and it’s a good nut— go ahead and put
whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him— whatever happens it
can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl.”
    Rosemary
had never done much thinking, save about the illimitability of her mother’s
perfections, so this final severance of the umbilical cord disturbed her sleep.
A false dawn sent the sky pressing through the tall French windows, and getting
up she walked out on the terrace, warm to her bare feet. There were secret
noises in the air, an insistent bird achieved an ill-natured triumph with regularity
in