Perchance to Marry by Celine Conway

age is bound to have had affairs, and perhaps you feel awfully young and untried. But you’re a nurse, darling, and nurses know everything. If I were you...”
    “But you’re not, are you? I don’t even have a little of your temperament—so I have to go about this in my own way.”
    “Well, it’s not a very sensible way, darling. Marcus is very masculine, and if you’re too embarrassed to show your feelings he’ll start getting unmanageable—and I can imagine nothing more devastating than a man like Marcus who has got out of hand! As a matter of fact,” she ended with soft insistence, “he’s already a little impatient with you, and I can guess why. That darting into the back seat of the car and running ahead up the steps, and clutching the letter from the pianist boy ... all those actions are typical of the way you’re behaving with your own fiancé. It’s quite unnatural and not like you at all.”
    Sally’s tones hardened a little. “Getting engaged is not like me, either. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake.”
    “Don’t say that!” Viola had stopped dabbing at her forehead with the stopper of the eau de cologne bottle. Her smile had gone and her blue eyes looked frightened. “Don’t ever say that again, Sally. We’re depending on Marcus now—he’s all we have.”
    Sally turned to the door. Her throat felt raw, but she answered casually, “He told you that you can count on him; that’s all the assurance you need. Have a nice sleep.”
    Sally went into her own room and stood for a moment near the foot of the bed, looking out across the balcony at the archway full of blue sky trimmed at the edges with the green tips of the trees. Then, slowly, she opened the letter from Peter Mailing. But there was nothing in it to dispel the depression. He had written it on his first day in Spain, when she had been on her way from Malaga to Barcelona, and so much had happened since then that Peter himself had become cloudy and unreal.
    She walked out into the balcony and sat down, leant her head back against the wall and tried to recapture some of the sweetness of her talks with Peter, the dreamy rapture of listening to the music he made. Strangely, she could only see them objectively, herself and Peter. Herself bemused by the speeding waves, luxurious idleness and the first light touch of love; and Peter, absorbed with his own emotions and opportunities and trying for all he was worth to appear sophisticated and bohemian; both of them rather pathetic viewed from the stark reality of the present.
    Deliberately, she shredded the letter. Unless he heard from her he wouldn’t write again; he was too selfish as well as too sensitive to risk a rebuff. In any case, he had written quickly, while still under the spell of the Mediterranean; by now it would have worn off and someone else would be listening with flattering intensity to his words and music.
    A small cloud passed over the sun and she realized it was cooler. She got up and tossed the fragments of paper into the decorative white waste-box, got into flat shoes and went into the corridor. After a second’s hesitation she walked quietly down the stairs and into the rather cosy little morning room. From the window, she made sure that the courtyard was empty; she could go out the front way. It was as she turned from the window that she caught sight of a piece of paper which a breeze must have wafted to the far corner, under the rather large writing desk. Automatically she crossed the room and bent to retrieve it, and almost, as she straightened, she crushed it into a ball. Then she realized that it wasn’t merely a scrap accidentally torn from a newspaper; it was a cutting which had been attached to something else, for the corner was ragged where it had become detached.
    She read, unthinkingly; read again and felt chilled. It was about a play which had been booked to run for six weeks in New York, and a paragraph which had been marked with a tiny red cross said: