“This is better than playing for those bum 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 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?”