Tender is the night / Ночь нежна. Книга для чтения на английском языке

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 hotel-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[64 - Dick had taken her mother on his right hand – Дик посадил ее мать справа от себя (согласно правилам этикета самую почетную гостью сажают справа от хозяина)]; 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[65 - to talk shop – говорить о работе, на профессиональные темы] 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.