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Rosemary put up her face quietly to be kissed. He looked at her for a moment as if he didn't understand. Ten holding her in the hollow of his arm he rubbed his cheek against her cheek’s softness, and then looked down at her for another long moment.
‘Such a lovely child,’ he said gravely.
She smiled up at him; her hands playing conventionally with the lapels of his coat. ‘I’m in love with you and Nicole. Actually that’s my secret—I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are. Honestly—I love you and Nicole—I do.’—So many times he had heard this—even the formula was the same.
Suddenly she came toward him, her youth vanishing as she passed inside the focus of his eyes and he had kissed her breathlessly as if she were any age at all. Ten she lay back against his arm and sighed.
‘I've decided to give you up,’ she said.
Dick started—had he said anything to imply that she possessed any part of him?
‘But that’s very mean,’ he managed to say lightly, ‘just when I was getting interested.’
‘I've loved you so—‘ As if it had been for years. She was weeping a little now. ‘I've loved you so-o-o.’
Ten he should have laughed, but he heard himself saying, ‘Not only are you beautiful but you are somehow on the grand scale. Everything you do, like pretending to be in love or pretending to be shy gets across.’
‘I know you don’t love me—I don’t expect it. But you said I should have told you about my birthday. Well, I did, and now for my birthday present I want you to come into my room a minute while I tell you something. Just one minute.’
They went in and he closed the door, and Rosemary stood close to him, not touching him. Te night had drawn the color from her face—she was pale as pale now, she was a white carnation left fer a dance.
‘When you smile—‘ He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, ‘I always think I’ll see a gap where you've lost some baby teeth.’
But he was too late—she came close up against him with a forlorn whisper.‘Take me.’
Trouble is when you’re sober you don’t want to see any-body, and when you’re tight nobody wants to see you.
‘You like to help everybody, don’t you?’ Rosemary said.‘I only pretend to.’
‘Mother likes to help everybody—of course she can’t help as many people as you do.’ She sighed. ‘Sometimes I think I’m the most selfish person in the world.’
‘Tat’s the state I’m in. I’d like to be with you now.’
Silence, then a sigh and an answer. ‘I wish you were with me now.’
There was the hotel room where she lay behind a telephone number, and little gusts of music wailed around her—
“And two—for tea. And me for you, And you for me 
‘Could I annoy you for a drink?’
He com-posed his face slowly, holding her hand a long time and forming sentences that did not emerge.‘You are the most—one of the most—‘
She was sorry, and rather revolted at his dirty hands, but she laughed in a well-bred way, as though it were nothing unusual to her to watch a man walking in a slow dream.
I’m Glad I Can Make You Cry.
A woman never knows What a good man she’s got 
Till after she turns him down ...’
Think how you love me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.
In a way—but nothing hangs together.’They both laughed but he pursued.‘Are you actually a virgin?’
‘No-o-o!’ she sang. ‘I've slept with six hundred and forty men—if that’s the answer you want.