Theresa Platt (she had been Terry Sheehan) watched her husband across the breakfast table with eyes that smoldered. But Orville Platt was quite unaware of any smoldering in progress. He was occupied with his eggs. How could he know that these very eggs were feeding the dull red menace in Terry Platt’s eyes?
When Orville Platt ate a soft-boiled egg he concentrated on it. He treated it as a great adventure. Which, after all, it is. Few adjuncts of our daily life contain the element of chance that is to be found in a three-minute breakfast egg.
This was Orville Platt’s method of attack: first, he chipped off the top, neatly. Then he bent forward and subjected it to a passionate and relentless scrutiny. Straightening–preparatory to plunging his spoon therein–he flapped his right elbow. It wasn’t exactly a flap; it was a pass between a hitch and a flap, and presented external evidence of a mental state. Orville Platt always gave that little preliminary jerk when he was contemplating a serious step, or when he was moved, or argumentative. It was a trick as innocent as it was maddening.
Terry Platt had learned to look for that flap–they had been married four years–to look for it, and to hate it with a morbid, unreasoning hate. That flap of the elbow was tearing Terry Platt’s nerves into raw, bleeding fragments.
Her fingers were clenched tightly under the table, now. She was breathing unevenly. “If he does that again,” she told herself, “if he flaps again when he opens the second egg, I’ll scream. I’ll scream. I’ll scream! I’ll sc
