“See here, Lenore. I’ve been patient about this Civil Defense business for long enough. I know you did it just to annoy me, anyhow. But you are not going to cut an important party and break a date with Kit, just because some fool rehearsal has been ordered. Get that perfectly straight.”
“Get this perfectly straight,” Lenore answered. “It’s an alert. Official. I was summoned.
As soon as I can change, I’m going. If you try to stop me, I’ll—I’d even call the police!” She went.
Netta Bailey thought that over; her hands shook as she raised her highball, swallowed deeply. She knew that when Lenore was in that mood, nobody could do anything with her. She went to the phone. She called the Sloane house. Neither Minerva nor Kit was there. She told the butler that Lenore had come home with a sick headache and gone to bed quite ill, but nothing serious. The butler said he would “inform” Minerva and Kit. Netta then phoned Thelma Emerson and told her the same thing. It would never do to let Kit, or people like the Emersons, think that a mere girl-scout duty like Civil Defense had caused Lenore to break a date, to miss a social event.
As an afterthought, Netta called a cab company. She was told there would be a long wait.
So she tried the Davises. Jimmie said he’d knock off shoveling the yard under the clothes line, gladly, to drive Lenore anywhere she wanted to go.
Lenore came downstairs, dressed in her bulky yellow decontamination suit, carrying her radiation counter. Netta regarded her with bitterness, but silently. She was silent because she didn’t trust herself to say anything. She was afraid of a quarrel now: things had gone too far, too well. She had no way of guessing that things had also gone—from her viewpoint—to smithereens. She stonily eyed the beautiful young woman’s head, strange above the cumbersome garment.
Jimmie Davis’s feet pounded four times to make the steps, to cross the porch. Freckle-faced, wearing heavy gloves, a wool cap, a sweater under his jacket, high school personified, he reached to ring the bell. Lenore opened the door hastily. He said, seeing her, “ What the …?”
“Civil Defense stuff,” she replied. “Take me over to the South High, Jimmie, will you? And thanks a million!”
He was gallant: “Who wouldn’t leave off shoveling his mother’s drying yard to take the world’s top beauty for a tour?”