PARTISAN REVIEW
He was such a terrible mixture of unattractive qualities that she
did not know how his face managed, throughout the manifestation
of each new symptom, to remain aristocratically handsome. They
were at the door now and she put her hand out toward the knob,
but he was ahead of her. "Permit me, Rose," he said. "Please greet
Miss Talmadge for my mother and me, but don't tell her what hap–
pened to the bleeding-heart." He grasped her hand in both of his
and squeezed it warmly and looking deep into her eyes, he whispered,
"The Samuel Sewell tomorrow."
She ran down the steps and he called after her, "Rose! My
name is Mr. Benson!"
She heard him close the door and at the corner she paused in
the snowfall, senseless with misery. She could
not
sleep another night
in
that room but she had nowhere to go. Tears for her homeless self
went down her cheeks with the snowflakes and she let a little sound
escape her, the murmur of an unhappy child. And then, because there
was nothing else to do, she opened the front door of Number 8 and
went into her room. She turned the radio on very loud and got a
program of jazz played on an organ and deafened to any other pos–
sible sound, she began to play solitaire, violently slapping the cards
down on the table. In this futile tantrum with the cards, she bent a
corner of the Queen of Hearts and this reminded her of her father's
custom of spending whole winter evenings cleaning a deck of cards
with a jackknife. A jackknife which he used, as well, to slice off a
plug of chewing tobacco, to trim his fingernails and, in the spring,
to dig embedded woodticks out of his skin.
When she came back from her dinner of swordfish at the Minute
Man, she found a note on the rug just inside the door which said:
MY
DEAR
RosE,
If
you would care to go to the picture show tonight in Acton,
I
am
at your disposal and wish you would telephone me. My name is in the
book.
I
could come to your door or you could come to mine. Mrs. Mor–
ton Ripley is coming to call on Mother.
I
do not know when another op–
portunity will offer so hope you will not refuse.
Awaiting your communication via telephone,
I
am,
LUCIUS BENSON
There was no sound from the room beyond the wall but the silence
was an uneasy one and she shuddered thinking of what might be
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