Next morning Dick came early into Nicole’s room. “I waited till I heard you up. Needless to say I feel badly about the evening — but how about no postmortems?”

“I’m agreed,” she answered coolly, carrying her face to the mirror.

“Tommy drove us home? Or did I dream it?”

“You know he did.”

“Seems probable,” he admitted, “since I just heard him coughing. I think I’ll call on him.”

She was glad when he left her, for almost the first time in her life — his awful faculty of being right seemed to have deserted him at last.

Tommy was stirring in his bed, waking for café au lait.

“Feel all right?” Dick asked.

When Tommy complained of a sore throat he seized at a professional attitude.

“Better have a gargle or something.”

“You have one?”

“Oddly enough I haven’t — probably Nicole has.”

“Don’t disturb her.”

“She’s up.”

“How is she?”

Dick turned around slowly. “Did you expect her to be dead because I was tight?” His tone was pleasant. “Nicole is now made of — of Georgia pine, which is the hardest wood known, except lignum vit? from New Zealand —”

Nicole, going downstairs, heard the end of the conversation. She knew, as she had always known, that Tommy loved her; she knew he had come to dislike Dick, and that Dick had realized it before he did, and would react in some positive way to the man’s lonely passion. This thought was succeeded by a moment of sheerly feminine satisfaction. She leaned over her children’s breakfast table and told off instructions to the governess, while upstairs two men were concerned about her.

Later in the garden she was happy; she did not want anything to happen, but only for the situation to remain in suspension as the two men tossed her from one mind to another; she had not existed for a long time, even as a ball.

“Nice, Rabbits, isn’t it — Or is it? Hey, Rabbit — hey you! Is it nice? — hey? Or does it sound very peculiar to you?”

The rabbit, after an experience of practically nothing else and cabbage leaves, agreed after a few tentative shiftings of the nose.

Nicole went on through her garden routine. She left the flowers she cut in designated spots to be brought to the house later by the gardener. Reaching the sea wall she fell into a communicative mood and no one to communicate with; so she stopped and deliberated. She was somewhat shocked at the idea of being interested in another man — but other women have lovers — why not me? In the fine spring morning the inhibitions of the male world disappeared and she reasoned as gaily as a flower, while the wind blew her hair until her head moved with it. Other women have had lovers — the same forces that last night had made her yield to Dick up to the point of death, now kept her head nodding to the wind, content and happy with the logic of, Why shouldn’t I?

She sat upon the low wall and looked down upon the sea. But from another sea, the wide swell of fantasy, she had fished out something tangible to lay beside the rest of her loot. If she need not, in her spirit, be forever one with Dick as he had appeared last night, she must be something in addition, not just an image on his mind, condemned to endless parades around the circumference of a medal.

Nicole had chosen this part of the wall on which to sit, because the cliff shaded to a slanting meadow with a cultivated vegetable garden. Through a cluster of boughs she saw two men carrying rakes and spades and talking in a counterpoint of Ni?oise and Proven?al. Attracted by their words and gestures she caught the sense:

“I laid her down here.”

“I took her behind the vines there.”

“She doesn’t care — neither does he. It was that sacred dog. Well, I laid her down here —”

“You got the rake?”

“You got it yourself, you clown.”

“Well, I don’t care where you laid her down. Until that night I never even felt a woman’s breast against my chest since............