A Special Providence

Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem?

After a second or two he thrust the muzzle forward and broke out the pane of glass, less because he knew it would make for a better aim than because it was what gunmen always did behind windows in movies.

Sumbitch wasn't even needed, that's the funny part; just some eager-beaver bastard couldn't mind his own business.

"I expect you'll miss your friends."

"I don't really have any friends; not real ones. Anyway, we'll make new friends."

That had the sound of a good exit line, so she went quickly into her room and slammed the door.

He seemed decent and kindly enough, but Prentice was cautioned by an old and trusted rule of his schooldays: Beware of the first friendly one; he's probably an outcast himself.

Late in the afternoon the company cooks brought food up to the village for the first hot meal they'd had since Belgium - salmon patties, dehydrated potatoes, and canned fruit salad - and most of the men seemed in high spirits as they sat or squatted over their mess kits in the street.

"What kind of catshit is this?"

"Salmon-patty catshit, that's what kind."

(and when would she ever learn not to monopolize a whole evening's conversation?)

Her face, in the spattered mirror, was a shocked and wild-eyed ruin.

The question of whether or not she would find it awkward being called "Mrs Nelson" remained unresolved; nobody in Scarsdale called her anything at all.

Electric trains drew the men away to the city each morning and the children were swallowed up by the school. The women, alone in their big, impeccable houses, let their days slip away in endless rounds of triviality - or at least, that was the way Alice saw them in her mind's eye. She pictured them idling through easy household chores or giving instructions to their maids, and painting their fingernails and fixing their hair and compounding their lassitude by spending hours on the telephone with one another, talking of bridge clubs and luncheons and functions of the P.T.A. If their lives included anything more interesting than that she didn't learn of it, for none of them ever called her up or dropped in for a neighbourly visit - nor, apparently, did any of their husbands ever strike up an acquaintance with Sterling on the train. Scarsdale behaved as though Alice and Sterling didn't exist.

After a while he stopped listening. His ears took in only the rise and fall of her voice, the elaborate, familiar, endless rhythm of it; but from long experience he was able to say "Oh yes" or "Of course," in all the right places.

"You make it sound so easy." But that was one of the wonderful things about Sterling Nelson: he could make any difficult thing sound easy, and the only other man she had ever known who could do that was Willard Slade. All the others, George, for example, had made easy things sound difficult.

"Okay, kid," Walker said, "This is it."

And it was the absurdity of the phrase - nobody said "This is it" except in the movies, unless they were phoney bastards like Loomis - that roused Prentice to his first real anger of the morning. He wanted to smash and break the head of anyone stupid enough to say a thing like that; he wanted to kill all the posturing fraudulence in the world, and it was all here before him in this big, dumb, bobbing face.