s shop; sick of marketing, of home
comforts, of Orville, of the flap.

Orville, you may remember, left at 8:19. The 11:23 bore Terry
Chicago-ward. She had left the house as it was--beds unmade, rooms
unswept, breakfast table uncleared. She intended never to come back.

Now and then a picture of the chaos she had left behind would flash
across her order-loving mind. The spoon on the tablecloth.

Orville's pajamas dangling over the bathroom chair. The coffeepot on
the gas stove.

"Pooh! What do I care?"

In her pocketbook she had a tidy sum saved out of the housekeeping
money. She was naturally thrifty, and Orville had never been
niggardly. Her meals when Orville was on the road had been those
sketchy, haphazard affairs with which women content themselves when
their household is manless. At noon she went into the dining car and
ordered a flaunting little repast of chicken salad and asparagus and
Neapolitan ice cream. The men in the dining car eyed her speculatively
and with appreciation. Then their glance dropped to the third finger of
her left hand, and wandered away. She had meant to remove it. In
fact, she had taken it off and dropped it into her bag. But her hand
felt so queer, so unaccustomed, so naked, that she had found herself
slipping the narrow band on again, and her thumb groped for it,
gratefully.

It was almost five o'clock when she reached Chicago. She felt no
uncertainty or bewilderment. She had been in Chicago three or four
times since her marriage. She went to a downtown hotel. It was too
late, she told herself, to look for a less expensive room that night.
When she had tidied herself she went out. The things she did were the
childish, aimless things that one does who finds herself in possession
of sudden liberty. She walked up State Street, and stared in the
windows; came back, turned into Madison, passed a bright little shop in
the window of which taffy-white and gold--was being wound endlessly and
fascinatingly about a double-jointed machine. She went in and bought a
sackful, and wandered on down the street, munching.

She had supper at one of those white-tiled sarcophagi that emblazon
Chicago's downtown side streets. It had been her original intention to
dine in state in the rose-and-gold dining room of her hotel. She had
even thought daringly of lobster. But at the last moment she recoiled
from the idea of dining alone in that wilderness of tables so obviously
meant for