Free The Ultimate Egoist by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

there’s a dear.” Her voice was kinder than it had been in some time. How
sweet
of Florrie!
    Florence slipped to the door. She leaned out and said softly in his ear, “Terry doesn’t feel so well tonight, Ben …” That was enough. He came in, was three steps across the room before he saw her.
    “Terry—” he swallowed awkwardly and stared at her. “I—I’m so sorry. I had no idea, or I wouldn’t have come. I’ll c-come backagain. Please take care of yourself … well, I—that is—well, goodn—”
    “Ben,” said Florence clearly, “You have the tickets already, haven’t you? I’ll go with you.” She threw off her smock, tossed a coat over her arm. “I’m ready.” She steered a bewildered Ben Pastene under the blue light. She looked sweet under its daylight rays, and she knew it. “Terry’ll be happier by herself. Don’t worry.”
    “If you say so …” The poor young man was badly shaken.
    That’s the end of the story. He proposed to Florence that night. On the borderline anyway, he needed very little persuasion. Florence never told him, of course, or Terry either, what had happened. The lamp was sodium vapor; its light is the cruelest in the spectrum. It illuminates every microscopic blemish, every inevitable wrinkle invisible in ordinary light. What choice had he, with that picture in his mind, the picture of a once-lovely Terry with black lips, dull hair, brown-rouged cheeks, blemished, lined skin, jaundiced flesh?
    A shabby trick? Possibly. But all’s fair—Terry would have tired of him; she only wanted what she couldn’t have. She was enormously resilient. She was happy again very soon. Florence too. Florence is so happy with her husband today that she hasn’t time for a hypothetical conscience …

Strangers on a Train
    T HE STEEL RAILS stretched back and back, closing steadily, following her like shears, great shining shears pursuing her. But they never closed on the train as they had closed on her life with Leo. Now that she could see it detachedly, she realized that the thread that bound them together had been doomed to be cut from the start. Funny …
    A man stepped out on the observation platform and sat beside her. She resented it a little; she had been enjoying her sole possession of the cool retreat. Oh well—
    She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. He was staring back at the flying roadbed, his face a little flushed as if he had been embarrassed. She smiled a little. Nice-looking guy, in his way, she thought objectively.
    He said to her, out of the corner of his mouth, “The road from Reno. Hah.” That “hah” can’t really be spelt; it was just a sound, a wordless question, answer, excuse.
    Well, why not talk to him? She could take care of herself. Meet a stranger on a train, talk to him, forget him. It was done every day. But she was still naive enough to get a little thrill of excitement out of it. What a world of hitherto unspoken things could be said by a stranger to a stranger!
    “You, too?” Her tone was joking, but he looked at her understandingly. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry already!”
    He joined her brief laugh. “No, not so you’d notice it.” He looked at her quizzically. “You look happy yourself,” he cracked.
    “I’m not, particularly,” she said gravely. “How can one be? I’ve got to undo what it took me years to build up. I don’t think it will take me quite as long to do that as it did to build it all.”
    He said, with a shade of shyness in his voice, “You’ve got yourdivorce, haven’t you? That’s the finish, isn’t it? What is there left to break down?
    Her eyes stopped seeing the whizzing ties as she spoke, and her mind brought words out of the past. “There’s lots left. I did what any woman does. I spent my teens growing up into the woman that would marry her man some day. Every minute of my life led upward and onward until the day I met him, and he went beside me along the same road. It went upward and