“ Sans doute,” he replied and rose, limping more than usual, as he followed her. Even Mrs. Conner came out and looked. There were three kittens on a forgotten pillow—three, thus far. The Crandons’ angora looked proud; Queenie looked appropriately suspicious, pleased, defiant and generally paternal.
“How dreamy!” Nora kept saying. “How perfectly dreamy!”
“Profane love,” her brother suggested, with a wise nod of the head.
“It is not! Cats don’t….”
“What on earth,” Mrs. Conner asked, “are you two fighting about?”
“Nora’s life interest of the moment,” Ted said, beating her to the reply, leaving his sister open-mouthed. “Something people for years have been calling sex.”
Beth chuckled. “You better get dressed. Your father will be along soon. And you still have to bathe, Ted.”
Henry Conner signed his mail, said good night to his secretary and went down two Rights of stairs to the ground floor of the West Side store of J. Morse and Company. The main building and the warehouses had, of course, vanished with the Bomb. They were using the West Side branch for business offices now and would go on doing so until the new Morse Building was finished. At present, it was a set of blueprints, the work of Charles Conner. Under the Emergency Building Code, they wouldn’t even lay the cornerstone for nearly another year.
He walked along the sales aisles, en joying, as always, the sights and smells of a hardware store-glitter of chrome, glass and steel-geometrical array of hand tools, garden tools, ornaments, plumbing fixtures, the splashes of color in the kitchenware section, the aroma of tar and rope and metal and machine oil.
The Oldsmobile was parked behind the store, near the loading area. It gave him an almost sentimental feeling: it would he good for quite a few more years. The old buggy had taken quite a beating, though. He looked in the trunk, to check, and drove away in the hot sunshine, aware that its hotness was diminishing, that there was a breeze. He was scheduled to pick up Charles first, then Pad Towson and Berry Black, then Lenore. Next week the car pool would be Towson’s lot.