She was out the kitchen door and her footsteps pattered off the side porch before he noticed that she had left his sheets of financial figures on the table. The Falcon door slammed; the gravel on the driveway spurted under her tires. Owen was dazed by the way she seemed to take his prospects and his troubles out of the house with her. The terrible metallic soulless taste of fatality, which had entered his mouth the day at this same table when Floyd had innocently imparted his school gossip, felt diluted. She’ll be fine. You just sit tight. The cats sneaked back to rub again against his ankles. He readjusted the position of the papers on the table and thought of scribbling a note to go with them but decided that their insistent presence there said enough. Instead of leaving at once, he wandered through the pantry, the living room, and the front hall to see what changes Phyllis had made lately, as a single woman. He could see very few—just the extra furniture, and the gaps in the bookshelves where she had let him have some volumes. He thought of stealing Finnegans Wake but decided against it. It would be a kind of flirting, misleading her. He tried to imagine returning to all this and couldn’t, quite. Houses you’ve left get too small to re-enter: a trick of perspective. He let himself out by the front door. In Pennsylvania, he remembered too late, it had been considered bad luck to enter by one door and leave by another. It was a pretty house, he thought, once outside, looking back at its clapboarded white sides, its shingled dormers, its black shutters and sinuous wisteria vine; but he had so long experienced the place as a confinement, a shell back into which he scuttled after a betrayal of its domestic pretense, that he felt the gaze of its windows as reproachful, like that of a forsaken pet.