LITMIR.BIZ

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      “What a beautiful garden!” Mrs. Speers exclaimed.

      “Nicole’s garden,” said Dick. “She won’t let it alone—she nags it all the time, worries about its diseases. Any day now I expect to have her come down with Powdery Mildew or Fly Speck, or Late Blight.” He pointed his forefinger decisively at Rosemary, saying with a lightness seeming to conceal a paternal interest, “I’m going to save your reason—I’m going to give you a hat to wear on the beach.”

      He turned them from the garden to the terrace, where he poured a cocktail. Earl Brady arrived, discovering Rosemary with surprise. His manner was softer than at the studio, as if his differentness had been put on at the gate, and Rosemary, comparing him instantly with Dick Diver, swung sharply toward the latter. In comparison Earl Brady seemed faintly gross, faintly ill-bred; once more, though, she felt an electric response to his person.

      He spoke familiarly to the children who were getting up from their outdoor supper.

      “Hello, Lanier, how about a song? Will you and Topsy sing me a song?”

      “What shall we sing?” agreed the little boy, with the odd chanting accent of American children brought up in France.

      “That song about ‘Mon Ami Pierrot.’”

      Brother and sister stood side by side without self-consciousness and their voices soared sweet and shrill upon the evening air.

      “Au clair de la lune

      Mon Ami Pierrot

      Prête-moi ta plume

      Pour écrire un mot

      Ma chandelle est morte

      Je n’ai plus de feu

      Ouvre-moi ta porte

      Pour l’amour de Dieu.”

      The singing ceased and the children, their faces aglow with the late sunshine, stood smiling calmly at their success. Rosemary was thinking that the Villa Diana was the centre of the world. On such a stage some memorable thing was sure to happen. She lighted up higher as the gate tinkled open and the rest of the guests arrived in a body—the McKiscos, Mrs. Abrams, Mr. Dumphry, and Mr. Campion came up to the terrace.

      Rosemary had a sharp feeling of disappointment—she looked quickly at Dick, as though to ask an explanation of this incongruous mingling. But there was nothing unusual in his expression. He greeted his new guests with a proud bearing and an obvious deference to their infinite and unknown possibilities. She believed in him so much that presently she accepted the rightness of the McKiscos’ presence as if she had expected to meet them all along.

      “I’ve met you in Paris,” McKisco said to Abe North, who with his wife had arrived on their heels, “in fact I’ve met you twice.”

      “Yes, I remember,” Abe said.

      “Then where was it?” demanded McKisco, not content to let well enough alone.

      “Why, I think—” Abe got tired of the game, “I can’t remember.”

      The interchange filled a pause and Rosemary’s instinct was that something tactful should be said by somebody, but Dick made no attempt to break up the grouping formed by these late arrivals, not even to disarm Mrs. McKisco of her air of supercilious amusement. He did not solve this social problem because he knew it was not of importance at the moment and would solve itself. He was saving his newness for a larger effort, waiting a more significant moment for his guests to be conscious of a good time.

      Rosemary stood beside Tommy Barban—he was in a particularly scornful mood and there seemed to be some special stimulus working upon him. He was leaving in the morning.

      “Going home?”

      “Home? I have no home. I am going to a war.”

      “What war?”

      “What war? Any war. I haven’t seen a paper lately but I suppose there’s a war—there always is.”

      “Don’t you care what you fight for?”

      “Not at all—so long as I’m well treated. When I’m in a rut I come to see the Divers, because then I know that in a few weeks I’ll want to go to war.”

      Rosemary stiffened.

      “You like the Divers,” she reminded him.

      “Of course—especially her—but they make me want to go to war.”

      She considered this, to no avail. The Divers made her want to stay near them forever.

      “You’re half American,” she said, as if that should solve the problem.

      “Also I’m half French, and I was educated in England and since I was eighteen I’ve worn the uniforms of eight countries. But I hope I did not give you the impression that I am not fond of the Divers—I am, especially of Nicole.”

      “How could any one help it?” she said simply.

      She felt far from him. The undertone of his words repelled her and she withdrew her adoration for the Divers from the profanity of his bitterness. She was glad he was not next to her at dinner and she was still thinking of his words “especially her” as they moved toward the table in the garden.

      For a moment now she was beside Dick Diver on the path. Alongside his hard, neat brightness everything faded into the surety that he knew everything. For a year, which was forever, she had had money and a certain celebrity and contact with the celebrated, and these latter had presented themselves merely as powerful 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.

       CHAPTER 7

      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

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