Lenore hung up. For half a minute, she merely stood beside the high shelf of the half-enclosed booth, her hand resting lightly on the mauve telephone. She was going to miss Thelma Emerson’s party. The fact gave her such a sense of elation that all other facts and all other assumptions were crowded out of her mind. She was possessed by a kind of happiness, a surge of joy, something she had not felt for a long time.
I hate him that much, she thought with astonishment.
Certainly it’s too much hatred for a bride. If I didn’t know before, she thought, I know now. Dad and Mom will hate me.
In the ensuing seconds, other parts of her brain meshed. Her good mind and the good education which had disciplined it took charge of her thoughts. Thoughts that plunged, climbed, curved in the dizzying pattern of cars sluicing over the track-maze of a roller coaster. Cars as seen against the summer skies on Swan Island. Her belly felt that way, besides: roller coaster.
All these people, she thought, staring at the people in the perfume, the peignoirs, the soft-sexy drape of music.
They haven’t been told. They aren’t supposed to know. It’s the latest, newest change in the orders.
It must be genuine, she thought.
Somewhere planes must have come over the borders, had a dog fight maybe. Maybe the air exercises started it. Maybe our bombers ran into something foreign scouting us.
Only then did she think, maybe it’s it. Blitz.
Condition Yellow.