Bertha reached for another cigarette. Her eyes, glittering with malevolence, regarded the fact of the clock. “You’re a damned liar,” she snapped angrily. “It isn’t eight-forty-five. It’s only seven-forty-five. You can’t move the sun ahead an hour just by saying so, so shut up your damned tick-tick-ticking and quit leering at me or I’ll throw you out of the window.”
Bertha scraped a match into flame and lit her second cigarette.
The telephone rang. She started to reach for the instrument, then thought better of it and said, “Go ahead. Ring, and be damned. I’m not going to get up until it’s warm.”
The telephone rang intermittently for almost two minutes, then quit. Bertha finished her cigarette, tried the temperature of the floor once more with her bare toes, wriggled them into bedroom slippers, and went across to the apartment door. She opened it, took in a quart of milk, a half-pint of coffee-cream, and the rolled-up morning newspaper. She slammed the door shut and retired to bed with the morning paper.
She glanced through the paper, keeping up a running fire of devastating comments. “Baloney... Sugar coated... The hell it is! Oh, bunk!.. You’d think we were a—” Her last comment was interrupted by the insistent buzzing of the front-door bell.
“Hell of a time for callers,” she grumbled to herself. “Thought all the salesmen were in the Army by this time.”
The metallic ticking of the alarm clock advised her that it was ten minutes past nine, Pacific War Time.
The apartment was getting warm. Bertha threw back most of the covers.
The buzzing signal from the lower front door continued at intermittent intervals. Bertha calmly ignored it. She put on a robe, went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. She was in the middle of her shower when peremptory knuckles sounded on the door of her apartment.
Bertha grunted annoyance and stepped out of the shower. She dried her legs and feet, wrapped a big bath-towel around her torso, thrust her head out of the bathroom door and yelled, “Who is it?”