Then the conversational buzz receded, like a tide ebbing. Jeanne-Marie blinked. Most of the crowd was gone. She looked at her wrist watch and saw that two hours had passed, looked at the small round surface of her table with the _Black Flamingo_ placemat and saw three cocktail glasses, all empty. Soon, Jeanne-Marie realized with a growing sense of disappointment, the before-theater crowd would bring the tide flowing back to the _Black Flamingo_ again. But her disappointment stemmed from the fact that nothing had happened to her and it was now almost seven o'clock. Oh, she had been stared at, admired, ogled even--but what beautiful girl wouldn't be? It was not that Jeanne-Marie had taken her twenty-four hours of beauty for granted. Rather, it was not beauty--certainly not beauty alone--she had wished for. And it wasn't sex-appeal, either, she told herself. Jeanne-Marie loved her husband and had experienced no lewd, day-dreaming fantasies about a secret lover who would sweep her off her proverbial feet. But Jeanne-Marie had waited, with a mixture of patience and passion, all her life--for something to happen. Something out of the ordinary. Something thrilling, as far removed from the pattern of her humdrum day-to-day existence as--as the spiral nebula in Andromeda. But, Jeanne-Marie told herself, I don't seem to attract adventure--not even when I'm beautiful. Would she then have to spend all the rest of her life waiting, waiting for that sudden knocking at the door, for the face of the unknown to make itself thrillingly known? She sighed and ordered another drink. She sipped it slowly, and sipped it, she knew, as if she spent much time sipping cocktails. Naturally, Mary-Jean's consumption of cocktails had been limited--generally to one a year, and that on the day of her wedding anniversary. But an ability to drink cocktails in a sophisticated manner seemed to go with the new body--with Jeanne-Marie. * * * * * When Jeanne-Marie was staring in moody silence at the little pickled pearl onion in the bottom of the now-empty cocktail glass, she was aware that someone had sat down beside her. A thrill of surprise and delight went through her body, making her shiver. This was the unexpected, she told herself. She knew it would be a man without looking. Knew it would be a good-looking fellow with the stamp of the man-of-the-world on his features. He could be nothing else. And so it was. Then Jeanne-Marie turned around slowly, not knowing if she should smile. When she faced the man now seated at her table, she gave him a cool quizzical look. He was a big man somewhere in his mid-thirties, with a craggy but handsome face and very wide shoulders. He was dressed, Jeanne-Marie decided, in quite good taste but expensively. He muttered, "Didn't expect you to be so pretty." Cocktail patter, thought Jeanne-Marie. "That's a very funny way to put a compliment."