Eliot knew exactly how he looked, with the sun gleaming in his hair. The hair would be parted slightly to one side, smoothed flat all over, and rich with dark, oily health. And the teeth: so white and even that Gladys said they reminded her of bathroom tiles. Today he’d asked Gladys to become his wife. And if Dr Sky didn’t like it, so what? Dr Sky, with his ‘separation of dream life from reality’, his ‘horizontal cracks in the ego structure’! Let him try flopping down on the truth table like a seal pup and trying on the hard hat of memory … Mansard would, by Heaven, marry beneath his station. Today she was making up her mind. While he waited, Mansard recalled the formula for locating street addresses on Fifth Avenue. From 775 to 1286, he knew, one dropped the last figure and subtracted 18. It was just something like that, he supposed, some geographical or historical fact, that had made him rich. So today he had asked Gladys to divorce her husband, Dean, who was unemployed.
