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 untilSchroeder'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 was no part of her.
She sat thus for the better part of an hour, motionless except for one forefinger that was, quite unconsciously, tapping out a popular and cheap little air that she had been strumming at the piano the evening before, having bought it downtown that same afternoon.It had struck Orville's fancy, and she had played it over and over for him.Her right forefinger was playing the entire tune, and something in the back of her head was following it accurately, though the separate thinking process was going on just the same.Her eyes were bright, and wide, and hot.Suddenly she became conscious of the musical antics of her finger.She folded it in with its mates, so that her hand became a fist.She stood up and stared down at the clutter of the breakfast table.The egg--that fateful second egg--had congealed to a mottled mess of yellow and white.The spoon lay on the cloth.His coffee, only half consumed, showed tan with a cold gray film over it.A slice of toast at the left of his plate seemed to grin ather with the semi-circular wedge that he had bitten out of it.