Eleven Read Online Free Page B

him get off the bus. He drove the horrible, deathly possibility out of his mind, kept it out of his mind and out of his flesh by walking.
    Suddenly, he had an inspiration. His idea didn’t go very far, it hadn’t an objective, but it was a kind of project for this evening. He began it on the way home, trying to imagine exactly what Dusenberry would write to Miss Whitcomb if he had read this last letter, and if Dusenberry would write back, not necessarily that he loved her, but that he at least cared, enough to want to see her again.
    It took him about fifteen minutes to write the letter. He said that he had been silent all this while because he hadn’t been sure of his own feelings or of hers. He said he wanted to see her before he toldher anything, and asked her when she might be able to see him. He couldn’t think of Dusenberry’s first name, if the girl had used it at all in her letter, but he remembered the R. L. Dusenberry on the envelope, and signed it simply “R.”
    While he had been writing it, he had not intended actually to send it to her, but as he read the anonymous, typewritten words, he began to consider it. It was so little to give her, and seemed so harmless: when can we see each other? But of course it was futile and false also. Dusenberry obviously didn’t care and never would, or he wouldn’t have let six days go by. If Dusenberry didn’t take up the situation where he left it off, he would be prolonging an unreality. Don stared at the “R.” and knew that all he wanted was an answer from “Edith,” one single, positive, happy answer. So he wrote below the letter, again on the typewriter:
P.S. Could you write to me c/o Dirksen and Hail, Chanin Building, N.Y.C.
    He could get the letter somehow, if Edith answered. And if she didn’t write in a few days, it would mean that Dusenberry had replied to her. Or if a letter from Edith came, Don could—he would have to—take it on himself to break off the affair as painlessly as possible.
    After he posted the letter, he felt completely free of it, and somehow relieved. He slept well, and awakened with a conviction that a letter awaited him in the box downstairs. When he saw that there wasn’t one (at least not one from Rosalind, only a telephone bill), he felt a swift and simple disappointment, an exasperation that hehad not experienced before. Now there seemed just no reason why he shouldn’t have got a letter.
    A letter from Scranton was at the office the next morning. Don spotted it on the receptionist’s desk and took it, and the receptionist was so busy at that moment on the telephone, that there was no question and not even a glance from her.
    “My darling,” it began, and he could scarcely bear to read its gush of sentiment, and folded the page up before anyone in the engineering department where he worked could see him reading it. He both liked and disliked having the letter in his pocket. He kept telling himself that he hadn’t really expected a letter, but he knew that wasn’t true. Why wouldn’t she have written? She suggested they go somewhere together next weekend (evidently Dusenberry was as free as the wind), and she asked him to set the time and place.
    He thought of her as he worked at his desk, thought of the ardent, palpitating, faceless piece of femininity in Scranton, that he could manipulate with a word. Ironic! And he couldn’t even make Rosalind answer him from Paris!
    “God!” he whispered, and got up from his desk. He left the office without a word to anyone.
    He had just thought of something fatal. It had occurred to him that Rosalind might all this time be planning how to break it to him that she didn’t love him, that she never could. He could not get the idea out of his mind. Now instead of imagining her happy, puzzled, or secretly pleased face, he saw her frowning over the awkward chore of composing a letter that would break it all off. He felt her pondering the phrases that would do it most gently.
    The idea