The irritating sound served to trigger the anger Galton and Molly Perkins had generated. Catherine said something that undoubtedly shocked the very curtains in her mother’s living room. She had never in her life been able to take a telephone off the hook. The alternative was to leave the telephone. Catherine marched out her back door and across the lawn to Tom’s house.

She pounded, rather than knocked, on the back door.

She was holding her heavy hair up off her neck, to take advantage of a slight breeze-maybe it would cool her down-when Tom answered. He was almost as surprised to receive a visit from Catherine as she was to be making one.

She had not entered the old office since Tom had moved in.

“Well, the landlady comes to call,” he said easily, opening the screen door for her to enter. “Just come this way through the foyer, and don’t scuff the marble.”

Catherine looked around as she went through the hall. Dr. Linton’s office had been a house before he bought it; now it was a house again. Her father had used the rooms at the back of the old house for examinations and storage. They were now Tom’s kitchen and bedrooms. The living room had been Dr. Linton’s waiting room; now it had cycled back. Catherine took stock of the reversion.

“You recognize, of course, my furniture period-Modern American Battered.”

Tom’s description was accurate. His couch and chairs were covered with mismatched throws, to hide the worst holes from sight-but not from sensation, as Catherine found when she sat down.

But the place was neater than she had expected. The couch, where Tom obviously had been lying, had a sad old trunk exactly centered before it to serve as a coffee table. On the trunk was a neat pile of magazines, a telephone aligned with the pile, and what Catherine supposed was a cigarette box beside a large cheap ashtray.