Who has been waiting every minute of every day of her life, Mary-Jean thought with unexpected bitterness, for something thrilling to happen to her. Only, it never did. There was the dulling, oddly frightening hand of routine, and nothing else. No Vale of a Thousand Delights, Mary-Jean thought, and laughed at her own unexpected, childish pipe-dreams. She had already stepped into the glass-enclosed shower stall when the door chimes rang pleasantly through the house. Momentarily she debated answering or pretending she wasn't home. But even a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman would break the routine with his chatter, she decided, and slipped into a dressing gown on her way downstairs. Tom, who had a do-it-yourself workshop in the basement, had installed an ingenious one-way looking slot in the front door sidelight, and Mary-Jean used this now to see who her visitor was. She frowned, almost regretting her impulse to answer the door. A little old man stood outside, holding an enormous suitcase. He was obviously a peddler. He was a rotund little man with a cheerful-enough face, red-cheeked, eyes sparkling and an incongruous little rosebud pout of a mouth under a long--make that, Mary-Jean observed, an incredibly long nose. He wore nondescript clothing--except for the hat. The hat was one of those sporty Tyrolean things which went so well with the tweeds and the college set. Yet oddly, the natty headpiece did not seem out of place on the rotund little man's head. Suddenly the little old man did a curious thing. He smiled at Mary-Jean. Smiled at her through the one-way glass. It could not be, she told herself, a coincidence. He was smiling right at her, smiling eye-to-eye, as it were, although he could not possibly see through the one-way glass. He removed the Tyrolean hat from a round bald dome of a head and executed a little bow. Mary-Jean fought down a crazy impulse to curtsey and instead opened the door with a quick, almost an angry motion. Her heart was pounding. "You called, madam?" the little old man demanded in a chirp of a voice. Chirp was the only word Mary-Jean could think of. The little old man sounded just like a bird. "Called?" Mary-Jean said in some confusion as the rotund peddler brought his enormous suitcase into the living room and unsnapped it on the sofa before Mary-Jean could stop him. There was an iron-clad, if unwritten rule, in Mary-Jean's household: nothing unclean ever visited that sofa. And the little peddler's bag looked as if it had spent time in every sooty waiting room from here to--Shalimar, Kashmir. "Not five minutes ago, you called," the peddler chirped. "Here I am. Now then, what will it be?" As he spoke, the peddler had arranged the enormous suitcase, now open, like a showcase. For some reason she could not fathom, Mary-Jean felt an unexpected thrill of fear clutch icily at her spine.