Quickly, Marc whirled around and stared in the direction of the alcove. As he did so the blood in his veins was sorely put to it whether to run hot or cold; Toffee, curve-some as a serpent and twice as fleshy, had stepped from behind the curtains and, at the moment, had arranged herself into a posture of highly seductive nature. This, judging by her expression, she considered humorous in the extreme. Not so, Marc.
"No!" he cried. "Stop!"
Julie did not bother to turn around; she merely stopped where she was in the doorway and placed her hands carefully on her hips. "Oh, no!" she groaned. "I've married a man who fancies himself a traffic signal!"
"No!" Marc yelled. "Not you!"
"Then who?" Julie asked with threadbare patience. "The twenty-seven little men with pointed heads sitting on the bureau? Is that who you mean, dearest?"
"Just go!" Marc implored her. "Go!"
"Stop, go, stop, go, stop go!" Julie shrilled. "I am not operated electrically. More's the pity!" Slowly she started to turn around to face her ever-changing spouse and—eventually—the nakedest redhead any wife ever had the sheer horror of discovering in her husband's bed chamber.
Marc felt fate bearing down on him in a way that made him understand the feelings of a deeply rooted daisy looking up at an approaching steam roller. He turned away and closed his eyes in the cowering aspect of one who expects to receive a load of brickbats on the nape of the neck. He stood, his nerves alerted against Julie's cry. There was a beat of silence—then it came.
But it was not the cry that Marc had braced himself against. This cry was sharply out of character, not at all the triumphant cawe of a wronged wife laying hand to definite proof of her husband's perfidy. This was sheerly, unmistakably a cry of basic, physical pain.