"I've known a lot of girls, but you've got something different.I don't know.You've got so much sense.A fellow can chum around with you.Little pal."Wetona would be their home.They rented a comfortable, seven- room house in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood, and Terry dropped the red velvet turbans and went in for picture hats.Orville bought her a piano whose tone was so good that to her ear, accustomed tothe metallic discords of the Bijou instrument, it sounded out of tune.She played a great deal at first, but unconsciously she missed the sharp spat of applause that used to follow her public performance.She would play a piece, brilliantly, and then her hands would drop to her lap.And the silence of her own sitting room would fall flat on her ears.It was better on the evenings when Orville was home.He sang, in his throaty, fat man's tenor, to Terry's expert accompaniment.
"This is better than playing for those ham actors, isn't it, hon?" And he would pinch her ear.
"Sure"--listlessly.
But after the first year she became accustomed to what she termed private life.She joined an afternoon sewing club, and was active in the ladies' branch of the U.C.T.She developed a knack at cooking, too, and Orville, after a week or ten days of hotel fare in small Wisconsin towns, would come home to sea-foam biscuits, and real soup, and honest pies and cake.Sometimes, in the midst of an appetizing 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, someday, 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 superneatness; 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.
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 herhands 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 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, andwandered 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 two.
After her supper she went to a picture show.She was amazed to find there, instead of the accustomed orchestra, a pipe organ that panted and throbbed and rumbled over lugubrious classics.The picture was about a faithless wife.Terry left in the middle of it.
She awoke next morning at seven, as usual, started up wildly, looked around, and dropped back.Nothing to get up for.The knowledge did not fill her with a rush of relief.She would have her breakfast in bed.She telephoned for it, languidly.But when it came she got up and ate it from the table, after all.
