With his miniature leather brief-case in his hand Richard Diver walked from the seventh arrondisement — where he left a note for Maria Wallis signed “Dicole,” the word with which he and Nicole had signed communications in the first days of love — to his shirt- makers¹ where the clerks made a fuss over him out of proportion to the money he spent. Ashamed at promising² so much to these poor Englishmen, with his fine manners, his air of having the key to security, ashamed of making a tailor shift an inch of silk on his arm. Afterward³ he went to the bar of the Crillon and drank a small coffee and two fingers of gin.

As he entered the hotel the halls had seemed unnaturally⁴ bright; when he left he realized that it was because it had already turned dark outside. It was a windy four-o’clock night with the leaves on the Champs élysées singing and failing, thin and wild. Dick turned down the Rue⁵ de Rivoli, walking two squares under the arcades⁶ to his bank where there was mail. Then he took a taxi and started up the Champs élysées through the first patter of rain, sitting alone with his love.

Back at two o’clock in the Roi George corridor the beauty of Nicole had been to the beauty of Rosemary as the beauty of Leonardo’s girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator. Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see.

Rosemary opened her door full of emotions no one else knew of. She was now what is sometimes called a “little wild thing”— by twenty- four full hours she was not yet unified⁷ and she was absorbed in playing around with chaos⁸; as if her destiny were a picture puzzle — counting benefits, counting hopes, telling off Dick, Nicole, her mother, the director she met yesterday, like stops on a string of

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