The D.A. Breaks an Egg

“I will,” she promised, knowing that once she had started back she’d burn up the roads from before dawn until midnight every day.

The operator said, “Your three minutes are up,” and Dorothy said, “ ’By, lover,” and hung up.

From that point on, events seemed to march through Dorothy’s consciousness with the sense of unreality which characterizes a dream so unreal that even in sleep one knows it must be a dream.

There was the big old-fashioned house on Chestnut Street, the moment of anxiety while she stood on the porch, which she had seen so often in pictures, the feeling of panic as she pressed her finger against the button on the doorbell and listened to the reverberating chimes.

Then Mrs. Lennox was answering the door in person, greeting her with a cordial clasp of icy fingers and the hard kiss of thin lips. “My dear, I’m so glad to see you! You’re one of the family, and I know you so well, and yet, my dear, this is the first time I’ve seen you. You’re just like your pictures!

“Children! It’s Dorothy!”

Mrs. Lennox put a thin arm around Dorothy’s waist and led her through the door into the spacious interior of the big frame house.

3

Standing in her bedroom, after everyone had said those first good nights, and with the door safely closed, Dorothy, thinking back over the events of the afternoon, could not help feeling that the whole thing had been symbolized somehow by that first greeting — the cordiality of an icy hand, the kiss of hard, thin lips.

Dinner had been an ordeal of formality, as though the family, while consciously trying to put its best foot forward, made an attempt at polite small talk which sounded strained, coming as it did from a group where the intimacy of family life prevailed.

It was as though some politely decrepit old man had seated himself in front of a mirror, bowed to his reflected image, and from time to time engaged in attempts to interest his mirrored self in comments, lending a polite interest to his statements on current events, laughing with attempted spontaneity at his own labored jokes.

But all the time there had been peering eyes, an unremitting appraisal. Dorothy might have been a butterfly impaled upon the pin of an anxious curiosity. Had Horace chosen someone who would be able to carry on the family traditions? Watch — watch the way she picks up her fork, the way she handles that salad fork... “Yes, indeed, Dorothy, we’ve heard so much from Horace — and weren’t you terrified, driving alone? But of course you haven’t been sheltered as, say, Moana... You must get Moana to show you her heirlooms. Do have some more of the roast.”

And so the meal had finally drawn to a close, leaving Dorothy with an impression of Mrs. Lennox which was exactly what she had anticipated. Steve Lennox had possibilities, once he could break away from the cramped environment of that household. Moana was a puzzle to Dorothy, a green-eyed blonde who should have been vivacious and wasn’t. She might have been actuated by some inner mechanism which was wound with a key, guaranteeing so many times to lift the spoon or fork, so many cuts with the knife, so many smiles of polite interest.

With the door of her bedroom closed and locked, Dorothy suddenly began to wonder about Horace.

Dorothy Clifton hated artificiality. She loved spontaneity, natural reactions, and originality. Horace had been inducted into the Army at a time when he had been only a little older than Steve was now, and foreign service, the masculine life of the Army, the exacting requirements of aviation, had, or at least should have, torn his roots free from the family soil and enabled him to transplant himself to an environment where his individuality could find some way of expressing itself.

But, after all, Horace had been raised in this atmosphere, must have absorbed a large part of it. Dorothy knew now that his fondness for his family was partially a pride in its impregnable respectability. Despite the fact that he himself had warned her that his mother was one who lived in a little world of her own, and insisted that everyone who penetrated into that world should conform to the plan of architecture laid out by its creator, Horace himself must have absorbed a lot of that in his boyhood. Would it crop out when he had a home of his own?

The night was warm and balmy, drenched with moonlight, and, acting on some impulse, and because she felt far too apprehensive to sleep, Dorothy switched out the light and went over to sit by the window.

She was looking down on the driveway, a driveway blocked by her own car, almost directly beneath her window.