But Julie had been better than most—until now. He looked at the tightly drawn lips, the circled eyes and tried to remember his wife's cool blonde beauty as it had been only a month ago. The contrast was disquieting. Well, these were harrowing times for her.
But they were just as harrowing for everyone else—for him. She ought to realize that. Suddenly, unaccountably, Marc felt his self-control slipping away from him with all the sleazy inevitability of a pair of silk shorts with rotten elastic. Suddenly the distorted face across the room was not at all the face of his wife, but the face of a vindictive stranger who had invaded his rights and his privacy with definite malice in mind. Reason left him, and, with a black sucking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he felt the last measure of his reserve trickle down the drain. Gripping the arms of his chair, he jutted his face out into the light and deliberately leered.
"With the world coming down around our ears," he snarled, "I suppose you expect me to sit here complacently simpering and snickering and snapping my gum like an addled adolescent? Don't you care that we may all go to blazes in the next few minutes?"
"No!" Julie screamed, fitting a direct answer to a direct question. "No, I don't care. I'm tired of caring. I'm tired through with caring. And I'm tired of you sitting there with those great elephantine ears of yours hinged to that radio. You've been at it day in, day out, day in, day out, day in...!"
"Stop repeating yourself like some idiot tropical bird," Marc snapped.
"Why don't you ever go down to the office any more?" Julie asked with womanly logic. "Why don't you get out of here and leave me alone?"
In heavy martyrdom Marc lifted his eyes to the ceiling. What was the use? Why go through it all again? He'd explained to her a million times that he no longer had any reason to go to the office. The advertising business had been one of the first to suffer. Who cared what the advertising industry had to say at a time like this? Who wanted to be beautiful or healthy or envied when there wasn't any future in it?
"Turn the radio on," he said steadily.
Julie's eyes actually sparked flame. "What? Do you really have the grassy green gall to ask me to turn that thing on again? I don't believe my ears!"