"And is Brooks the star?"
She nodded, grinning. "And you are the diamond. It is what she wants—diamonds."
"She wants more than that"—tenderness crept into his voice—"she wants love—and I can give it."
"She wants Dr. Brooks. 'Most any woman would," said Marie-Louise cruelly. "We all know he is different. You know it, and I know it, and Eve knows it. He is bigger in some ways, and better!"
They found Eve and Richard in a pavilion dancing in strange company, to raucous music. Later the four of them rode on a merry-go-round, with Marie-Louise on a dolphin and Eve on a swan, with the two men mounted on twin dragons. They ate chowder and broiled lobster in a restaurant high in a fantastic tower. They swept up painted Alpine slopes in reckless cars, they drifted through dark tunnels in gorgeous gondolas. Eve took her pleasures with a sort of feverish enthusiasm, Marie-Louise with the air of a skeptic trying out a new thing.
"Mother would faint and fade away if she knew I was here," Marie-Louise told Richard as she sat next to him in a movie show, "and so would Dad. He would object to the germs and she would object to the crowd. Mother is like a flower in a sunlighted garden. She can't imagine that a lily could grow with its feet in the mud. But they do. And Dad knows it. But he likes to have mother stay in the sunlighted garden. He would never have fallen in love with her if her roots had been in the mud."
She was murmuring this into Richard's ear. Eve was on the other side of him, with Pip beyond.
"I've never had a day like this," Marie-Louise further confided, "and I am not sure that I like it. It seems so far away from—Pan—and the trees—and the river."
Her voice dropped into silence, and Richard sat there beside her like a stone, seeing nothing of the pictures thrown on the screen. He saw a road which led between spired cedars, he saw an old house with a wide porch. He saw a golden-lighted table, and his mother's face across the candles. He saw a girl in a brown coat scattering food for the birds with a kind little hand—he heard the sound of a bell!
When they reached the yacht, Winifred was dressed for dinner, and Eve and Marie-Louise scurried below to change. They dined on the upper deck by moonlight, and sat late enjoying the still warmth of the night. There was no wind and they seemed to sail through silver waters.