Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
She sat thus for the better part of an hour, motionless except for one
forefinger that was, quite unconsciously, tapping out a popular and
cheap little air that she had been strumming at the piano the evening
before, having bought it down town that same afternoon. It had struck
Orville's fancy, and she had played it over and over for him. Her right
forefinger was playing the entire tune, and something in the back of her
head was following it accurately, though the separate thinking process
was going on just the same. Her eyes were bright, and wide, and hot.
Suddenly she became conscious of the musical antics of her finger. She
folded it in with its mates, so that her hand became a fist. She stood
up and stared down at the clutter of the breakfast table. The egg--that
fateful second egg--had congealed to a mottled mess of yellow and white.
The spoon lay on the cloth. His coffee, only half consumed, showed tan
with a cold grey film over it. A slice of toast at the left of his plate
seemed to grin at her with the semi-circular wedge that he had bitten
out of it.
Terry stared down at this congealing remnant. Then she laughed, a hard,
high little laugh, pushed a plate away contemptuously with her hand, and
walked into the sitting room. On the piano was the piece of music
(Bennie Gottschalk's great song hit, "Hicky Bloo") which she had been
playing the night before. She picked it up, tore it straight across,
once, placed the pieces back to back and tore it across again. Then she
dropped the pieces to the floor.
"You bet I'm going," she said, as though concluding a train of thought.
"You just bet I'm going. Right now!"
And Terry went. She went for much the same reason as that given by the
ladye of high degree in the old English song--she who had left her lord
and bed and board to go with the raggle-taggle gipsies-O! The thing that
was sending Terry Platt away was much more than a conjugal quarrel
precipitated by a soft-boiled egg and a flap of the arm. It went so much
deeper that if psychology had not become a cant word we might drag it
into the explanation. It went so deep that it's necessary to delve back
to the days when Theresa Platt was Terry Sheehan to get the real
significance of it, and of the things she did after she went.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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