Ernest Hemingway

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES
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CHAPTER XIX

THE Colonel breakfasted with the leisure of a fighter who has been clipped badly, hears four, and knows how to relax truly for five seconds more.

“Portrait,” he said. “You ought to relax too. That’s the only thing that is going to be difficult about you. That’s what they call the static element in painting. You know, Portrait, that almost no pictures, paintings rather, move at all. A few do. But not many.

“I wish that your mistress was here and we could have movement. How do girls like you and she know so much so damn young and be so beautiful?

“With us, if a girl is really beautiful, she comes from Texas and maybe, with luck, she can tell you what month it is. They can all count good though.

“They teach them how to count, and keep their legs together, and how to put their hair up in pin curls. Some­time, portrait, for your sins, if you have any, you ought to have to sleep in a bed with a girl who has put her hair up in pin curls to be beautiful tomorrow. Not tonight. They’d never be beautiful tonight. For tomorrow, when we make the competition.

“The girl, Renata, that you are, is sleeping now with­out ever having done anything to her hair. She is sleeping with it spread out on the pillow and all it is to her is a glorious, dark, silky annoyance, that she can hardly re­member to comb, except that her governess taught her. “I see her in the street with the lovely long-legged stride and the wind doing anything it wants to her hair, and her true breasts under the sweater, and then I see the nights in Texas with the pin curls; tight and subjected by metallic instruments.

“Pin me no pin curls, my beloved,” he said to the Por­trait, “and I will try to lay it on the line in round, heavy, hard silver dollars or with the other.”

I mustn’t get rough, he thought.

Then he said to the portrait, for he did not capitalize her now in his mind, “You are so God-damned beautiful you stink. Also you are (...)

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