GARDEN OF EDEN by Ernest Hemingway

“I’m ashamed,” Catherine said. “Look at me and see if I’m not ashamed.”

David put his arm around her.

“Don’t be ashamed,” he said. “Just remember how you’d like to hear old Heiress here recall how she went up in that plane, just herself and the plane, and there was nothing between her and the earth, imagine the Earth, with a big E, but just her plane and they might have been killed and smashed to horrible bits both of them and she lose her money and her health and her sanity and her life with a capital L and her loved ones or me or you or Jesus, all with capital letters, if she “crashed”— put the word crashed in quotes.”

“Did you ever solo, Heiress?”

“No,” the girl said. “I don’t have to now. But I would like another drink. I love you, David.”

“Kiss her again the way you did before,” Catherine said.

“Sometime,” David said. “I’m making drinks.”

“I’m so glad we’re all friends again and everything is fine,” Catherine said. She was very animated now and her voice was natural and almost relaxed.

“I forgot about the surprise that Heiress bought this morning. I’ll go and get it.”

When Catherine was gone, the girl took David’s hand and held it very tight and then kissed it. They sat and looked at each other. She touched his hand with her fingers almost absent mindedly. She curled her fingers around his and then released them. “We don’t need to talk,” she said. “You don’t want me to make a speech do you?”

“No. But we have to talk sometime.”

‘Would you like me to go away?”

“You’d be smarter to go away.

“Would you kiss me so I know that it is all right if I stay?” Catherine had come in now with the young waiter who carried a large tin of caviar in a bowl of ice on a tray with a plate of toast. “That was a wonderful kiss,” she said. “Everyone saw it so there’s no longer any fear of scandal or anything,” Catherine said. “They’re cutting up some egg whites and some onion.

It was very large firm gray caviar and Catherine dipped it onto the pieces of thin toast.

“Heiress bought you a case of B6llinger Brut 1915 and there is some iced. Don’t you think we should drink a bottle with this?”

“Sure,” said David. “Let’s have it all through the meal.”

“Isn’t it lucky Heiress and I are rich so you’ll never have anything to worry about? We’ll take good care of him won’t we Heiress?”

‘We must try very hard,” the girl said. “I’m trying to study his needs. This was all we could find for today.”

Chapter Fourteen

HE HAD 5LEPT about two hours when the daylight woke him and he looked at Catherine sleeping easily and looking happy in her sleep. He left her looking beautiful and young and unspoiled and then went into the bathroom and showered and put on a pair of shorts and walked barefoot through the garden to the room where he worked. The sky was washed clean after the wind and it was the fresh early morning of a new day toward the end of

summer.

He started in again on the new and difficult story and worked attacking each thing that for years he had put off facing. He worked until nearly eleven o’clock and when he had finished for the day he shut up the room and went out and found the two girls playing chess at a table in the garden. They both looked fresh and young and as attractive as the wind-washed morning

sky.

“She’s beating me again,” Catherine said. “How are you, David?”

The girl smiled at him very shyly.

They are the two loveliest girls I’ve ever seen, David thought. Now what will this day bring. “How are you two?” he said.

“We’re very well,” the girl said. “Did you have good luck?”

“It’s all uphill but it’s going well,” he said.

“You haven’t had any breakfast.”

“It’s too late for breakfast,” David said.

“Nonsense,” Catherine said. “You’re wife of the day, Heiress. Make him eat breakfast.”

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