That afternoon I charged myself a Chanel red velvet dress and a hat
shaped like a Dutch cap, that matched it. I sent the young copy-writer
for suède shoes (her feet were the same size as mine) and gloves and
stockings and a handbag. (She had excellent “style sense”; she would
have my job some day no doubt.) The child was very pleased, because she
had to go to another store for the shoes and would have a chance to buy
herself tea and cake en route. I bribed two girls in the beauty shop to
stay after the store closed, to give me a facial and manicure and
shampoo.
At five-thirty, I had a shower in the employees “recreation room,” and
the shampoo, manicure and so on. At ten to seven, I was back in my silly
private office, revising the child’s copy on “perennial youth.” (It had
turned out much better than I had feared. The FIRM was fairly well
pleased with it. I had only to incorporate such of their suggestions as
they would remember having made.)
I finished the ad, and telephoned the typographer to send a boy for it.
Then I went outside, into the long empty advertising department, and put
on my hat, in front of a small cracked mirror. It was seven o’clock. I
remembered that Pete was usually late. I lighted a cigarette, and went
back to my own office, smoking it.
I was not particularly excited. If Peter wanted me back, and said so,
something in me that was quite comfortably dead would resurrect and
start singing paeans. If Peter did not want me back, and had just
telephoned on an impulse, I would dine with him; and get up next morning
and go on to breakfast and to work, and to whatever developed for the
evening, just as on any other day. . . . If Peter wanted a divorce, I
would go see Lucia’s lawyer. . . . If he did not, I would let things
drift, and go right on living in the hope of a miracle. Why not? There
was nothing else I wanted as much as that miracle. Perhaps that proved I
was a fool. I did not care if it did. I had been over all that ground
with myself so many times before. . . . There was nothing to be excited
about, now.
It was five minutes past seven. I went again into the department and
brought back with me the last month’s files of Pete’s paper. I could
talk to him at dinner about some of his recent stories. Up to this
instant, I had not read one of Pete’s stories since he had left me. I
knew that it would trouble me to find phrases in them that I had heard
him use. I knew, though, that he had covered the Doane electrocution.
(Mrs. Doane was that young women who killed her sleeping husband with
such cool-blooded deliberateness that the jury convicted her
notwithstanding her ingénue face.)
I turned over the files, looking for his signatures. There were a good
many of them. Pete was turning out to be a good newspaperman. Once, I
had clipped every story he wrote, in the days when his stories were
three paragraphs buried on an inside page. Recollection of that fact
distressed me; gave me the flat feeling of
I-used-to-be-much-younger-than-I-am.
I began to read his account of the electrocution, and could not tell
whether it were good or bad. Remembrances of Pete kept getting between
me and the sense of it.
A phrase toward the end did catch at me, though. It made me laugh. He
said, describing the entrance of Mrs. Doane into the electrocution
chamber, “She looked so very small.” I laughed, because Pete always said
that, or something like it, about every woman who ever stirred him for a
moment.
I heard the door at the end of the department outside open and close,
softly.
And suddenly, I had the sense of something dreadful about to happen. I
heard steps, the familiar tread of someone drunk, walking steadily by an
effort, coming closer across that long dark room outside. The sound of
footsteps stopped.