"O, I'll be careful. Anyway, there won't be any shooting. Just a precaution like rubbers. But I must be off. I have an engagement. Thanks a lot."
Wenny, going out the door, caught a contracted look of anxiety on Roscoe's tanned face as, puffing at his pipe, he strode back and forth in front of the fireplace. Wenny went down the dark brick corridor towards his own room, the gun in his back pocket pressing hard and cold on his thigh.
* * * *
Wenny walked among the muddy paths of the Fenway. Patches of snow among the shrubberies were crumbling fast in the tingle of spring that flushed the misty afternoon. The twigs of forsythias showed intensest yellow against the sopping grey of turf. In the gravel paths there was a tiny lisping sound of water as the frost came out of the ground. The rustle of it in the ruddy light was maddening like the rustle of silk. This womanish hysteria, he was saying to himself; to escape it tense and collected the way the earth slithers out from between the tight fists of winter. A man and a woman frowsy and middle-aged, a hat with mauve pansies beside a dust-grained derby; as Wenny passed the woman was tapping restlessly on the gravel with a narrow pointed toe. The thought came to him: Perhaps Nan and I will be like that, afraid to look in each other's eyes because we didn't dare when we were young and talk about if we'd done this and if we'd done that... What a rotten thing to think about the first day of spring.
In his back pocket a hard shape pressed against the fleshy part of his thigh; from its focus his whole being was stiffening to hardness.
He turned and with a sudden spring in his step crossed the street from the park, passed the livid tomblike oblong of the Dental Clinic, and pulled open the glass door of the Swansea. A grindorgan was playing at the curb. The glass door slammed behind him, cutting off the Marseillaise on an upward note. He ran up the stairs and stood still a moment in front of the reddish-stained door.
Through a bitter film of constraint he saw Nan in a pearlgrey dress pulling open the door for him.
"I never saw that one before."
"This dress? Do you like it?"
Down the hall came the aviary sound of people at tea.