You've Got It Coming

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The moment he came into the room she knew something was wrong.

He said in a flat, cold voice, “Hello, baby,” and without looking at her, he took off his hat and his topcoat, tossed them on to the settee and walked over to the fire and sat down. His face was hard and pallid and the sullen expression in his eyes made him a stranger.

During the six months they had been going around together, she had never seen him like this, and she could only think of one explanation: he was set to give her the brush off.

For weeks she had been wondering how much longer it would last. Not that he had shown any signs of growing tired of her, but he was now the ninth man in her life and she had come to expect a brush off sooner or later.

She had long ceased to kid herself about her relations with men. She was thirty-two, and the life she had led had taken most of the gloss off her beauty. At one time, and it seemed to her a long way back into the past, she had w o n the second prize for the Miss America competition of 1947, and if she had known what she knew now, she was sure that if she had played her cards right with two of the judges as the winner had done, she wouldn’t have been second, but first. She had been given the inevitable screen test and had played bit parts in B pictures under the direction of Solly Lowenstien. Maybe she had been too free and easy with Solly. She had hoped he would have pushed her ahead in the movie business if she accommodated him, but it hadn't worked out that way. After a few months he had lost interest in her, and as if he had given the signal, the C.C.A. had lost interest in her too. After Hollywood, she had done a little modelling, then she had become a nightclub hostess. It was at the Eldorado club that she had met Ben Delaney.

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