sea-foam biscuits, and real soup, and honest
pies and cake. Sometimes, in the midst of an appetising meal he would
lay down his knife and fork and lean back in his chair, and regard the
cool and unruffled Terry with a sort of reverence in his eyes. Then he
would get up, and come around to the other side of the table, and tip
her pretty face up to his.

"I'll bet I'll wake up, some day, and find out it's all a dream. You
know this kind of thing doesn't really happen--not to a dub like me."

One year; two; three; four. Routine. A little boredom. Some impatience.
She began to find fault with the very things she had liked in him: his
super-neatness; his fondness for dashing suit patterns; his throaty
tenor; his worship of her. And the flap. Oh, above all, that flap! That
little, innocent, meaningless mannerism that made her tremble with
nervousness. She hated it so that she could not trust herself to speak
of it to him. That was the trouble. Had she spoken of it, laughingly or
in earnest, before it became an obsession with her, that hideous
breakfast quarrel, with its taunts, and revilings, and open hate, might
never have come to pass. For that matter, any one of those foreign
fellows with the guttural names and the psychoanalytical minds could
have located her trouble in one _seance_.

Terry Platt herself didn't know what was the matter with her. She would
have denied that anything was wrong. She didn't even throw her hands
above her head and shriek: "I want to live! I want to live! I want to
live!" like a lady in a play. She only knew she was sick of sewing at
the Wetona West-End Red Cross 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
Chicagoward. 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 table-cloth. Orville's
pajamas dangling over the bathroom chair. The coffee-pot 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 or