“It may be all right for actresses, but for the rest of us—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Irene advised. “I know that dream upset you, but can’t you see that it wasn’t real? It couldn’t happen that way.”
“If everybody listened to the advertising on TV there’d be a lot more golden-haired people than there are now. There’d be too many. You’d see yourself coming and going just like the parade of golden-haired people in my dream. Everybody whose hair wasn’t golden would be thinking, ‘Your hair is dull. Your hair is drab!’—just the way I did.”
“Why?” asked Dale, looking past Irene’s golden head to Judy’s mop of curly red hair. “How anyone could say a thing like that about either of you is more than I can understand.”
“I can’t understand it either,” Judy admitted, “but it’s true. I kept hearing dull, drab, until even the train wheels seemed to be repeating it. If I didn’t have red hair and if I hadn’t been teased all my life about how bright it is—”
“Well, what would you do?” asked Irene when Judy hesitated.
“I’d wash my hair with that golden hair wash. I did buy some for you,” Judy confessed when Irene made no comment. Dale was busy with his driving, and Judy sat between them in the front seat of the car. There was hardly any traffic this early in the morning, but there was a heavy fog that made it hard for Dale to see more than a few feet ahead.
“For me?” Irene asked incredulously. “Why on earth would you buy that stuff for me?”
“I don’t know,” Judy confessed. “I don’t like the way I’ve been thinking things without knowing why I thought them. Peter never lets anything turn him from his convictions. I had a feeling, on the train, that something was wrong, while I was dreaming. I couldn’t know about Peter. But I did know something was wrong.”
Judy had been trying to hide her worry, but it was no use. They talked of many things as the car sped on toward the hospital. But their thoughts were with Peter. New York’s skyline could be seen but faintly as they crossed Manhattan Bridge. The fog had lifted a little, but it was not yet daylight when Dale stopped before a large building. It loomed, gray and forbidding, against the cold night sky.