The sun was up now, although the room was still half dark because of the lowered blinds. It will be hot for him on the road, she thought. If he left immediately, he will be well on the way by now. He should arrive before lunch. It is an hour since he called me, and still I feel nothing; perhaps, after all, it need not be so terrible. These things happen all the time, and people survive them; they are exaggerated in retrospect, and in literature. She closed her eyes. I have not even wept, and I always cry so easily. Perhaps I can sleep, and when I wake it will seem more distant than ever. But why am I so cold, she wondered again. Why can’t I get warm? She moved her arm, which had been rigidly clasped across her body, and felt it tremble. Beneath her, the bed was like stone.

She had not even finished dressing when he arrived. She had meant, of course, to take especial care with her appearance but had slept, instead, right through the morning—probably from the exhaustion of the last few days. When she awoke, there was barely time to take her shower and put the coffee on; not even time to make her bed. It was only because his train was a little late that she managed to get into her clothes before the doorbell rang.

He had taken a train that got him to town about noon; it was the only possible one, on Sunday. The day before, when he telephoned her from the country, he had said: “I’ll leave the car with May and the children.” It was one of the things she had wondered about when she put the phone down, trying to discover what position he had taken with May. It had been a short and comfortless conversation, because the telephone at his summer house was on a party line. And yet, she thought, if he had something definite to tell her he could have driven to another town, called from a drugstore. She had by then passed two days of silence and suspense since he left town on Wednesday to talk to May, and the overstated nonchalance of the telephone conversation made her frantic. “But can’t you tell me anything?” she cried, as he prepared to hang up. After an admonishing silence, he had said only: “When I see you on Sunday.”

She finished buttoning her dress and pushed her feet into a pair of sandals before she opened the door. Her face still glistened from the shower, her uncombed hair hung down her back, secured at the neck by a frayed ribbon; these things, absurdly, were uppermost in her mind as she turned the doorknob.