Mabel Gladney had been down to the little market and was on her way back home, pulling her wheeled basket. One of the wheels had developed a squeak that it didn’t have before. In the basket were milk, bread, a one-pound bag of peanuts in the shell, light bulbs, cat food, a carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes with filter tips, and a romance magazine. She would have to hide the magazine as soon as she got home and not let anybody see it.
About halfway home, she stopped on a corner in the shelter of an overgrown cedar tree to rest for a minute and get a quick look at the magazine. She looked around to see if anybody was coming and, seeing no one, opened the magazine to a random page. There was a story entitled “How to Improve Your Love Life,” with a big picture that covered a whole page. In the picture, a man and a woman were sitting on a couch in front of a fire looking into each other’s eyes. The woman was wearing a low-cut red dress and had hair the color of a lemon. The man had shiny black hair streaked with gray and an eye patch over one eye, making him look sinister and foreign. If he spoke, Mabel thought, he would have a voice like Conrad Veidt. A few pages over was another story, “I am in Love with My Father Confessor and Afraid My Husband is Going to Find Out.” She read the first few sentences of that story, but stopped reading when she heard somebody coming.
