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

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 tooth-paste in vats and drew mouth-wash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens[107 - Five-and-Ten – (амер., уст.) магазин, где продаются различные товары по цене не более пяти или десяти центов] 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[108 - dance card – книжечка, где записывалось, с кем девушка танцует каждый из танцев], 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, “Why don’t you go?” and then suddenly, “Or let me go if you don’t want to.” But Nicole went to one more place to buy corsages for them both and sent one to Mary North.