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By Root 4786 0

matter to him any longer. He thought that he would see her tonight, almost hating it, because tomorrow morning seemed so close and then he would have to leave her—he wondered whether he could remain in town tomorrow, or whether he should leave now, without seeing her, so that he could wait, so that he could always have it ahead of him: the moment of closing his hands over her shoulders and looking down at her face. You’re going insane, he thought—but he knew that if she were beside him through every hour of his days, it would still be the same, he would never have enough of it, he would have to invent some senseless form of torture for himself in order to bear it—he knew he would see her tonight, and the thought of leaving without it made the pleasure greater, a moment’s torture to underscore his certainty of the hours ahead. He would leave the light on in her living room, he thought, and hold her across the bed, and see nothing but the curve of the strip of light running from her waist to her ankle, a single line drawing the whole shape of her long, slim body in the darkness, then he would pull her head into the light, to see her face, to see it falling back, unresisting, her hair over his arm, her eyes closed, the face drawn as in a look of pain, her mouth open to him.

He stood at the wall, waiting, to let all the events of the day drop away from him, to feel free, to know that the next span of time was his.

When the door of his room flew open without warning, he did not quite hear or believe it, at first. He saw the silhouette of a woman, then of a bellboy who put down a suitcase and vanished. The voice he heard was Lillian’s: “Why, Henry! All alone and in the dark?”

She pressed a light switch by the door. She stood there, fastidiously groomed, wearing a pale beige traveling suit that looked as if she had traveled under glass; she was smiling and pulling her gloves off with the air of having reached home.

“Are you in for the evening, dear?” she asked. “Or were you going out?”

He did not know how long a time passed before he answered, “What are you doing here?”

“Why, don’t you remember that Jim Taggart invited us to his wedding? It’s tonight.”

“I didn’t intend to go to his wedding.”

“Oh, but I did!”

“Why didn’t you tell me this morning, before I left?”

“To surprise you, darling.” She laughed gaily. “It’s practically impossible to drag you to any social function, but I thought you might do it like this, on the spur of the moment, just to go out and have a good time, as married couples are supposed to. I thought you wouldn’t mind it—you’ve been staying overnight in New York so often!”

He saw the casual glance thrown at him from under the brim of her fashionably tilted hat. He said nothing.

“Of course, I was running a risk,” she said. “You might have been taking somebody out to dinner.” He said nothing. “Or were you, perhaps, intending to return home tonight?”

“No.”

“Did you have an engagement for this evening?”

“No.”

“Fine.” She pointed at her suitcase. “I brought my evening clothes. Will you bet me a corsage of orchids that I can get dressed faster than you can?”

He thought that Dagny would be at her brother’s wedding tonight; the evening did not matter to him any longer. “I’ll take you out, if you wish,” he said, “but not to that wedding.”

“Oh, but that’s where I want to go! It’s the most preposterous event of the season, and everybody’s been looking forward to it for weeks, all my friends. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. There isn’t any better show in town—nor better publicized. It’s a perfectly ridiculous marriage, but just about what you’d expect from Jim Taggart.”

She was moving casually through the room, glancing around, as if getting acquainted with an unfamiliar place. “I haven’t been in New York for years,” she said. “Not with you, that is. Not on any formal occasion.”

He noticed the pause in the aimless wandering of her eyes, a glance that stopped briefly on a filled ashtray and moved on. He felt a stab of revulsion.

She saw it in his face and laughed gaily. “Oh but, darling, I’m not relieved!