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life.
    The message awaiting me at the hotel desk—Major Rohmer would be detained—he would call after six. Four hours to kill, and I could not spend them in my room staring at the wall. I was restless, needing to walk off the excitement which invigorated me. Down the avenue—the purchase of a scarf. (I burned that along with the letters, a sorry waste, my prudent training argued at the time—but I could not look at it except with dull sickness.) Then, I was turning into that other hotel because Sally Logan had said they had such a superlative buffet luncheon. That had been an adventure; super hotels were not my usual style, but that day I felt so liberated I dared it.
    Then—in the lobby seeing him—and her. She was, like Leslie Lowndes, everything I was not. The latest hairstyle, the perfect-featured face, the drawling voice which caressed languidly, clothes I could never hope to acquire. A hand with an emerald ring laid in obvious possession on Mark’s arm, eyes for no one but him. Then the voice of the deferential hotel clerk, pitched—perhaps—no, not just perhaps, but necessarily, high to reach me:
    “Mrs. Rohmer, there is a message for you.”
    Even as she half-turned to pick up the envelope he held out, she had not released that proprietary grasp on Mark. And—
    Now I sat up in bed, dug my fists down on either side of me.

    Remember—remember—you asked for it.
    Mark’s eyes flitting around over her shoulder as she busied herself with that envelope. Meeting mine. Nothing—nothing at all in his face. It was as blank as a stranger’s. What my features must have expressed at that moment, I do not even dare to guess.
    Somehow I turned—I was out in the street, thrusting through sidewalk traffic, before I was thinking straight again. Girlfriend and wife—I know that my reaction would be considered weird in these days of permissiveness. I can only offer that I was reared, and so imbued, by a stern set of moralistic rules that I found the situation not amusing—as it would be to my contemporaries—but soiling. Open marriages and meaningful encounters—I read about them, I touched upon them in the persons of some of my acquaintances, but that mode of life is totally foreign to me.
    It had taken me very little time to check out of my hotel, find that there was a flight out, which I could just make after a mad dash to the airport. I sat crouched in my seat, sick and shaking, knowing that I had never been anything at all but perhaps a source of mild amusement.
    For days after I cringed every time the phone rang, made an effort to sort the mail before Aunt Otilda (no matter to whom a letter was addressed, its contents must be shared in her house) could sight it. It took me a week at least back home before I realized with great thankfulness of heart that it could well be Major Rohmer did not know my address. Though why I expected to hear from him I cannot answer. His blank face in the lobby had been answer enough. If he hadput himself to the “give the poor girl a thrill” bit, he had succeeded admirably. Having achieved that, I should be thankful that fate had taken me to that point of contact.
    Yes, I had gone to Washington, my nerve stiffened to the point of perhaps playing the very role which, after, disgusted me. What would I have done, in my euphoria, if Mark had suggested a togetherness weekend? Luckily, I never had to learn the depths of my infatuation.
    No one had ever known back home. I had found it very easy to lapse into what Aunt Otilda expected of me, making no more gestures towards any kind of freedom. There was a soothing security to living by her rules. When she died at last, I found myself mistress of a small income, a house I speedily sold, and then a studio apartment, and a chance to see if there was anyone under my skin except Miss Jansen’s niece: the one who works in the library, you know—a very dull girl—but well meaning.
    I had come again to Ladensville, mainly became the library