certain little ceremony (as had the neighbors). She would stand in
the doorway, watching him down the street, the heavier sample case
banging occasionally at his shin. The depot was only three blocks
away. Terry watched him with fond but unillusioned eyes, which proves
that she really loved him. He was a dapper, well-dressed fat man, with
a weakness for pronounced patterns in suitings, and addicted to
derbies. One week on the road, one week at home. That was his routine.
The wholesale grocery trade liked Platt, and he had for his customers
the fondness that a traveling salesman has who is successful in his
territory. Before his marriage to Terry Sheehan his little red address
book had been overwhelming proof against the theory that nobody loves a
fat man.

Terry, standing in the doorway, always knew that when he reached the
corner just where Schroeder's house threatened to hide him from view,
he would stop, drop the sample case, wave his hand just once, pick up
the sample case and go on, proceeding backward for a step or two until
Schroeder's house made good its threat. It was a comic scene in the
eyes of the onlooker, perhaps because a chubby Romeo offends the sense
of fitness. The neighbors, lurking behind their parlor curtains, had
laughed at first. But after a while they learned to look for that
little scene, and to take it unto themselves, as if it were a personal
thing. Fifteen-year wives whose husbands had long since abandoned
flowery farewells used to get a vicarious thrill out of it, and to eye
Terry with a sort of envy.

This morning Orville Platt did not even falter when he reached
Schroeder's corner. He marched straight on, looking steadily ahead,
the heavy bags swinging from either hand. Even if he had
stopped--though she knew he wouldn't--Terry Platt would not have seen
him. She remained seated at the disordered breakfast table, a
dreadfully still figure, and sinister; a figure of stone and fire, of
ice and flame. Over and over in her mind she was milling the things
she might have said to him, and had not. She brewed a hundred
vitriolic cruelties that she might have flung in his face. She would
concoct one biting brutality, and dismiss it for a second, and abandon
that for a third. She was too angry to cry--a dangerous state in a
woman. She was what is known as cold mad, so that her mind was working
clearly and with amazing swiftness, and yet as though it were a thing
detached; a thing that