She woke up cooled and shamed. The sight of her beauty in the mirror did not reassure¹ her but only awakened² the ache of yesterday and a letter, forwarded by her mother, from the boy who had taken her to the Yale prom last fall, which announced his presence in Paris was no help — all that seemed far away. She emerged from her room for the ordeal³ of meeting the Divers⁴ weighted with a double trouble. But it was hidden by a sheath as impermeable⁵ as Nicole’s when they met and went together to a series of fittings. It was consoling, though, when Nicole remarked, apropos⁶ of a distraught saleswoman: “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do — they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval⁷.” Yesterday in her expansiveness Rosemary would have resented that remark — to-day in her desire to minimize what had happened she welcomed it eagerly. She admired Nicole for her beauty and her wisdom, and also for the first time in her life she was jealous. Just before leaving Gausse’s hotel her mother had said in that casual tone, which Rosemary knew concealed⁸ her most significant opinions, that Nicole was a great beauty, with the frank implication that Rosemary was not. This did not bother Rosemary, who had only recently been allowed to learn that she was even personable; so that her prettiness never seemed exactly her own but rather an acquirement, like her French. Nevertheless, in the taxi she looked at Nicole, matching herself against her. There were all the potentialities for romantic love in that lovely body and in the delicate mouth, sometimes tight, sometimes expectantly half open to the world. Nicole had been a beauty as a young girl and she would be a beauty later when her skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones — the essential structure was there. She had been white-Saxon-blonde but she was more beautiful now that her hair had darkened than when it had been like a cloud and more beautiful than she.

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