Free Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald Page B

gratitude of Nicole’s “Oh, DO I!” echoed in her mind. The particular
mood of the passage she had witnessed lay ahead of her; but however far she was
from it her stomach told her it was all right—she had none of the aversion she
had felt in the playing of certain love scenes in pictures.
    Being
far away from it she nevertheless irrevocably
participated in it now, and shopping with Nicole she was much more conscious of
the assignation than Nicole herself. She looked at Nicole in a new way,
estimating her attractions. Certainly she was the most attractive woman
Rosemary had ever met—with her hardness, her devotions and loyalties, and a certain elusiveness, which Rosemary, thinking now through
her mother’s middle-class mind, associated with her attitude about money.
Rosemary spent money she had earned—she was here in
Europe
due to the fact that she had gone in the pool six times that January day with
her temperature roving from 99° in the early morning to 103°, when her mother
stopped it.
    With
Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and two hats and four pairs of shoes
with her money. Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought
the things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn’t
possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought colored
beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs , love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house and three
yards of some new cloth the color of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits,
a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen
handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and
burning bush from Hermes— bought all these things not a bit like a high-class
courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional
equipment and insurance—but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole
was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run
at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in
factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper
hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the
Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee
plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new
tractors—these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the
whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such
processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face
holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very simple
principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so
accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would
try to imitate it.
    It was
almost four. Nicole stood in a shop with a love bird on her shoulder, and had
one of her infrequent outbursts of speech.
    “Well,
what if you hadn’t gone in that pool that day—I sometimes wonder about such
things. Just before the war we were in
Berlin
—I
was thirteen, it was just before Mother died. My sister was going to a court
ball and she had three of the royal princes on her dance card, all arranged by
a chamberlain and everything. Half an hour before she was going to start she
had a side ache and a high fever. The doctor said it was appendicitis and she
ought to be operated on. But Mother had her plans made, so Baby went to the
ball and danced till two with an ice pack strapped on under her evening dress.
She was operated on at
seven o’clock
next morning.”
    It was
good to be hard, then; all nice people were hard on themselves. But it was
four o’clock
and Rosemary kept
thinking of Dick waiting for Nicole now at the hotel. She must go there, she must not make him wait for her. She kept
thinking,