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and what are you doing here?
    I told her my name. “Your mother asked me to sit down for a minute.”
    “Where is Mother?” She tried to speak in an ordinary tone, but she looked at me suspiciously, as if I had Mother’s body hidden in a closet.
    “Upstairs.”
    “Are you a policeman?”
    “No.”
    “I just wondered. She phoned me at the office about half an hour ago and said she was going to ask for police protection. I couldn’t get away immediately.”
    She stopped abruptly, and looked around the room. Its furnishings would have been antiques if they’d ever possessed distinction. The carpet was threadbare, the wallpaperfaded and stained brown in patches. The mohair sofa that matched the chair I’d sat in was ripped and spilling its guts. The mahogany veneer was peeling off the coffeetable which held the empty glass. It was no wonder Mrs. Gley preferred darkness and gin and television to the light of morning.
    The girl went past me in a birdlike rush, snatched up the glass, and sniffed at it. “I thought so.”
    On the screen behind her a male announcer, not so very male, was telling women how to be odorless and beloved. The girl turned with the glass in her hand. For a second I thought she’d throw it at the screen. Instead she stooped and switched the television off. Its light faded slowly like a dream.
    “Did Mother pour you a drink?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Has anyone else been here?”
    “Not that I know of. But your mother may have the right idea. I mean, about police protection.”
    She looked at me in silence for a minute. Her eyes were the same color as her mother’s, and had the same intensity, almost tangible on my face. Her gaze dropped to the glass in her hand. Setting it down, she said under cover of the movement: “You know about Carl? Did Mother tell you?”
    “I talked to Dr. Brockley at the hospital this morning. I had a run-in with your husband earlier. As a matter of fact he took my car.” I told her about that.
    She listened with her head bowed, biting one knuckle like a doleful child. But there was nothing childish about the look she gave me. It held a startled awareness, as if she’d had to grow up in a hurry, painfully. I had a feeling that she was the one who had suffered most in the family trouble. There was resignation in her posture, and in the undertones of her voice:
    “I’m sorry. He never did anything like that before.”
    “I’m sorry, too.”
    “Why did you come here?”
    I had several motives, some more obscure than others. I picked the easiest: “I want my car back. If I can handle it myself, without reporting it as a theft—”
    “But you said yourself that we should call the police.”
    “For protection, yes. Your mother’s frightened.”
    “Mother’s very easily frightened. I’m not. Anyway, there’s no basis for it. Carl’s never hurt anyone, let alone Mother and me. He talks a lot sometimes—that’s all it amounts to. I’m not afraid of him.” She gave me a shrewd and very female glance. “Are you?”
    Under the circumstances, I had to say I wasn’t. I couldn’t be sure, though. Perhaps that was my reason for coming there—the obscurest motive that underlay the others.
    “I’ve always been able to handle Carl,” she said. “I’d never have let them take him to the hospital, if I could have kept him here and looked after him myself. But somebody had to go to work.” She frowned. “What can be keeping Mother? Excuse me for a minute.”
    She left the room and started up the stairs. The ringing of a telephone brought her down into the hallway again. From somewhere upstairs her mother called:
    “Is that you, Mildred? The phone’s ringing.”
    “Yes. I’ll get it.” I heard her lift the receiver. “This is Mildred. Zinnie? What do you want? … Are you sure? … No, I can’t. I can’t possibly.… I don’t believe it.…” Then, on a rising note: “All
right
. I’ll come.”
    The receiver dropped in its cradle. I went to the