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enlargements of the people with whom the doctor’s widow and her
daughter had associated in a hôtel -pension in Paris.
Rosemary was a romantic and her career had not provided many satisfactory
opportunities on that score. Her mother, with the idea of a career for
Rosemary, would not tolerate any such spurious substitutes as the excitations
available on all sides, and indeed Rosemary was already beyond that—she was In the movies but not at all At them. So when she had seen
approval of Dick Diver in her mother’s face it meant that he was “the real
thing”; it meant permission to go as far as she could.
    “I was
watching you,” he said, and she knew he meant it. “We’ve grown very fond of
you.”
    “I fell
in love with you the first time I saw you,” she said quietly. He pretended not
to have heard, as if the compliment were purely formal.
    “New
friends,” he said, as if it were an important point, “can often have a better time together than old friends.”
    With
that remark, which she did not understand precisely, she found herself at the
table, picked out by slowly emerging lights against the dark dusk. A chord of
delight struck inside her when she saw that Dick had taken her mother on his
right hand; for herself she was between Luis Campion and Brady.
    Surcharged
with her emotion she turned to Brady with the intention of confiding in him,
but at her first mention of Dick a hard-boiled sparkle in his eyes gave her to
understand that he refused the fatherly office. In turn she was equally firm
when he tried to monopolize her hand, so they talked shop or rather she
listened while he talked shop, her polite eyes never leaving his face, but her
mind was so definitely elsewhere that she felt he must guess the fact.
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from
her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with
only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

 
 

     
    VII
    In a
pause Rosemary looked away and up the table where Nicole sat between Tommy Barban and Abe North, her chow’s hair foaming and frothing
in the candlelight. Rosemary listened, caught sharply by the rich clipped voice
in infrequent speech:
    “The
poor man,” Nicole exclaimed. “Why did you want to saw him in two?”
    “Naturally
I wanted to see what was inside a waiter. Wouldn’t you like to know what was
inside a waiter?”
    “Old
menus,” suggested Nicole with a short laugh. “Pieces of
broken china and tips and pencil stubs.”
    “Exactly—but
the thing was to prove it scientifically. And of course doing it with that
musical saw would have eliminated any sordidness.”
    “Did you
intend to play the saw while you performed the operation?” Tommy inquired.
    “We
didn’t get quite that far. We were alarmed by the screams. We thought he might
rupture something.”
    “All
sounds very peculiar to me,” said Nicole. “Any musician that’ll use another
musician’s saw to—”
    They had
been at table half an hour and a perceptible change had set in—person by person
had given up something, a preoccupation, an anxiety, a suspicion, and now they
were only their best selves and the Divers’ guests. Not to have been friendly
and interested would have seemed to reflect on the Divers, so now they were all
trying, and seeing this, Rosemary liked everyone—except McKisco ,
who had contrived to be the unassimilated member of the party. This was less
from ill will than from his determination to sustain with wine the good spirits
he had enjoyed on his arrival. Lying back in his place between Earl Brady, to
whom he had addressed several withering remarks about the movies, and Mrs.
Abrams, to whom he said nothing, he stared at Dick Diver with an expression of
devastating irony, the effect being occasionally interrupted by his attempts to
engage Dick in a cater-cornered conversation across the