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I
As she listened to the muffled voices in the next room, Zelda shuddered, realizing that she had led herself and the three people she loved most in all the world to the brink of tragedy
HE world won't let you get away with making the same mistake twice. . . ."
I could almost hear my father saying it as he used to when I was a little girl, his smile gentle, but his eyes very grave. "No, Zelda, a first mistake is just — well, just a mistake. But if you do the same fool thing again, it's a habit — and the world deals hard with people who make a habit of fool things!"
Yet there I was, making a mistake and making it for the second time. No mere "fool thing" this, either. It was a cruel, monstrous thing I was doing, deliberately wrecking the lives of three other people, to say nothing of my own.
I stood pressed against the door of Dwight's study, past the point of being ashamed of eavesdropping, listening to Miggs' anxious young voice, to Dwight's kindly, wise one, answering her. I felt as people must who are trapped by fire — pressedih upon, smothered, helpless and hopeless. And so ashamed of myself, so terribly ashamed!
Oh, I could be forgiven for the first mistake, I suppose. That was weakness, a weakness in me that found me unable to face facts, to look life in the eye, to call my emotions by their right names. But to indulge that weakness, to lie to
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myself, to seek to repeat for a second time a cowardly escape which had been no escape at all — !
It had started the spring before, when I met D wight. I remember that it was April, with a pale, watery sunlight promising flowers and green grass somewhere ahead. I was doing fairly well, earning my living partly by typing manuscripts for other people and partly by selling manuscripts of my own, mostly stories for children's magazines. I had an apartment with a terrace which compensated for the three flights of stairs it was necessary to climb to reach it. My younger sister, Marcia, called Miggs by everyone ever since I can remember, had just added a bright spot to my life by coming to stay with me while she went to business school.
If life was good before I met Dwight Foster, it was just about perfect afterwards. Not that I fell in love with him — he was just a friend, a perfect, delightful companion whose every word was worth hearing, and with an easy humor to spice the words. He was a grand person in himself, and besides, he was exactly what I wanted to be, had achieved exactly what I wanted to achieve; he was a writer of firm and established repu
tation. His had broke* before, hac play, a mc got to knc "Rain Still all other to the topi
We met! cocktail pa| other at o| the hostess room to thought, "( noticed onj the dark, his ears, th| at his ej Then I loc that laught| fine lines welled up overflowed! mouth, to s| in his wine Actually, he was neither young ncjjj old. He had reached that pleasarj age of just-past-forty, when a ma is settled but not "set."
I found myself telling him aabout my ambitions, about the re'j jection slips which formed the large part of my mail, about the iderj which seemed so wonderful as ideq and which, somehow, turned flat an i dull as they went on paper. I fell
RADIO MIRR<'