"Know?" Simon suggested. "Perhaps not. Perhaps. But your boy friend did. And you must admit that he's clever. Within his own class, anyway. Clever enough, for instance, to set you up in that fancy tenement because it might always be useful to have a pretty girl on call to entertain the tired business man — or decoy the simple sucker. That is, when he didn't want her himself. A very happy way of combining business with pleasure, if you ask me… Or is it rude of me to insist on this masculine viewpoint? Should I have thought of a girl friend instead — some nice motherly creature who…"
He raised a hand as she started out of the chair with dark eyes blazing.
"Take it easy," he drawled. "Maybe I was just kidding. It's obvious that the bag I found in your apartment was a man's. But so were the pajamas that were hanging in the closet where I heaved Humpty and Dumpty."
Her hand went to her mouth, and her exquisite features suddenly sagged into a kind of blank smear. It was absurd and pitiful, he thought, how a few words could transform a lovely and vital creature into a haggard woman with neck cords that streaked her throat and eyes that were hollow and lusterless with fear.
"I don't know what you mean," she said.
"I've heard more original remarks than that," he said. "But if it's any help to you, I don't know what you mean either. I didn't say the pajamas had any name embroidered on them — or did I?"
She sank back on to the edge of the chair, her hands clasped in her lap, not comfortably or relaxed, but as if she had only paused there in the expectation of having to move again.
He slid a cigarette forward in his pack and offered it to her. In the same solicitous way, he lighted it for her and then lighted one for himself. He drew slowly at it, not savoring the smoke, and looking at her, and wondering why in a world so sadly in need of beauty he should have to be talking to her in this way and know that this was the only way to talk, and that was how it was and there was nothing else to do.
He said, with a slight but sincere shrug: "This isn't a fight. It might have been a beautiful honeymoon. But maybe it just wasn't in the cards. Anyway, it'll have to wait now."
She said: "I suppose so."