GRACE: What? [Grace is looking through her purse. Blanche sits up stiffly and sets down the hairbrush.]

BILL COLLECTOR [slowly and distinctly]: Tell her that George is through with her.

GRACE: I was afraid that he was. He hasn’t called her up in nearly two weeks. What happened between them?

BILL COLLECTOR: He got tired of waiting for the ice to melt.

GRACE: She’s frigid?

BILL COLLECTOR: No, but she wants to get married and George doesn’t want to get married. He wanted to have intimate relations and she wouldn’t have intimate relations without a ring on her finger.

GRACE: But she’s not cold, is she?

BILL COLLECTOR: Quite the contrary.

GRACE: That’s what I suspected.

BILL COLLECTOR: Watch her with your husband.

GRACE: I’ve noticed how she looks at him. She listens to us at night and we have no privacy from her.

BILL COLLECTOR: She is eating her heart out with jealousy.

BLANCHE [in a stifled whisper]: No!

GRACE: And she’s lost George?

BILL COLLECTOR: He never wants to see her again.

GRACE: And that’s why he hasn’t called.

BILL COLLECTOR: He’ll never call.

GRACE: Every time the phone rings she thinks it’s him. [Laughs and raises her voice.] You never can find pennies when you want them.

BILL COLLECTOR: It never will be George again. And after George there won’t be any others because her unhappy nature has begun to show in her face.

[Blanche turns horrified to the mirror.]

BILL COLLECTOR: She’s getting lines of bitterness.

GRACE: I’ve seen them, too. Her throat is getting so drawn!

[Blanche touches her throat.]

BILL COLLECTOR: Sometimes the process of decay works very swiftly.

GRACE: Twenty-two, did you say?

BILL COLLECTOR [raising his voice]: Yes, Ma’am, a dollar twenty-two.

GRACE: It’s impossible to hide those little snakes in the brain.

[Blanche catches her breath and clenches her hands to her temples.]

BILL COLLECTOR: Ha-ha! Yes, you can hear them hiss.

GRACE: Is that what it is, that hissing sound at night from where she sleeps?

BILL COLLECTOR: Ha-ha! I’ve got it. [He picks up a piece of change dropped on floor.] —Yes, that’s what it is! George could hear them, too, when she brought up marriage. Thinking that she could hold out on him long enough to make him give in and produce the diamond.

GRACE: She wanted a solitaire, huh?

BILL COLLECTOR: That’s what the she-devil hoped for.

GRACE: She’ll get a solitaire all of her live-long days!

BILL COLLECTOR: He won’t call again.

GRACE: And she’ll lose her job at the school when her nerves break up, and I can hear them breaking. Can’t you hear them breaking?

[There is a cracking noise—splintering: Blanche makes frantic gestures and rises slowly and stiffly from her chair at the dresser.]