didn’t answer for a moment. She was looking thoughtfully down at her coffee cup. Then she said, “Yes. If we still feel we want to separate when we get to the West Coast, that sounds quite fair to me.” I glanced quickly at her. “What do you mean?” She raised her eyes then. There was more Susie than Madelon Butler in them. “You don’t make it very easy for me to say, do you? But I meant just that. Maybe we won’t want to separate by the time we get there.”

“It’s funny,” I said slowly. “I had thought of that too.” There was a faint, tantalizing smile about her lips. “Changing into someone else isn’t a thing that happens only from the skin out. I told you I wasn’t acting Susie Mumble. I am Susie. And I’m becoming fascinated with her. For the past few days I’ve been increasingly conscious of unsuspected possibilities in Susie, and I was rather hoping you were too.”

Twenty

I started to get up.

She shook her head, smiling. “No, Lee. Don’t rush me. Remember, Susie is something so foreign to my entire life up to this time that I can’t hurry her. She has to do her own developing, in her own way. You understand, don’t you?”

She stopped abruptly, and before I could say anything, she added, “But enough of this. We’ve got work to do.”

We went in and sat down on the sofa. She was excited now. I put the three keys on the glass top of the coffee table. She separated them, pushing them out one at a time.

“Third National,” she murmured happily, “Mrs. Henry L. Carstairs. Merchants Trust, Mrs. James R. Hatch. Seaboard Bank and Trust, Mrs. Lucille Manning.”

It was easy now that she had won. Well, almost won. I put the keys back in my wallet.

She looked at her watch. “It’s a quarter of eight. The banks won’t open until ten. I’ve got to go to the beauty shop first, and buy some clothes.”

I exploded. “Hold it! Don’t you realize we haven’t got time for that? They know I’m here in town. Every minute of delay is dangerous.”

She broke in on me. “Not while you’re here in the apartment. And I can’t go into those banks like this. My hair may look all right to you, but to another woman it’s as ragged as if it had been chewed off. And these clothes are terrible. I look like a ragpicker. People would notice, and that’s the one thing we can’t risk. I have to look like someone who conceivably might have a safe-deposit box.”

In the end I gave in. I had to. As she pointed out, she’d be back by twelve, which was a delay of only two hours. And I didn’t want to queer it by starting a fight now.

She called a number of beauty shops until she found one that would take her right away. I gave her two hundred dollars of the bankroll. She called a cab and left.

Just before she opened the door to go out she turned and faced me. That same tantalizing smile was on her face.

“I just happened to think,” she said. “When I came in this door I was Madelon Butler. And now I’m going out for the first time as Susie Mumble. Would you like to help me set the mood?”

I helped her. Not that she needed much. The way Susie’s mouth felt on mine, they could pour her into the mold any time now. She was a finished product.

She clung to me for a moment. “It won’t be long now, will it?”

“No,” I said.

It certainly wouldn’t.

But it would be long enough.

I walked the floor. I smoked chain fashion. I listened for the elevator, going through that same old hell of waiting every time it stopped. This would be the time they would come, right at the end when I had it won. In the last four hours.

In the last three hours. . .

In the last two. . .

And now, on top of that, I was tightening up just thinking of that trip downtown. That was going to be rugged. The city would be swarming with cops looking for me.

I’d be in the car all the time, though, and that would help. Of course, they had an idea now of what the car looked like, but there were thousands of the same kind and the cop had no chance to see the license plates. The main thing in my favor was the fact that