In the comfortable, clean, ugly room, with a double bed across the front, and a gas-cooker, sink and icebox at the back, Jewel was waiting for him, wrapped in a pink, quilted silk coat, which was beginning to reveal its cotton stuffing. She stood motionless in the center of the floor, dusky, solid, significantly shapeless, like a piece of sculpture beginning to emerge from the stone.
“What the hell . . . !” began Joe angrily. “A nice thing . . . !”
“Aah!” she said, moving slightly. “You don’t own me!”
“You don’t have to have them now!” he cried.
“Sure, I don’t have to have them. But I can have them, if I want.”
Joe, cursing, flung his mackintosh on the sofa. Like a wolf, he snarled obliquely.
“If you’d let me know when you were coming . . .” she suggested.
“Aah!” he snarled. “That would spoil it. I like to come on the impulse. . . . And you like me to.”
“Sure, I do,” she said with a slow smile. “But you can’t blame me, if you find me engaged.”
“Damnation!” cried Joe, flinging back and forth across the room with his soft tread. “Oh, damnation! I might as well go, now!”