Too Much Too Soon by Jacqueline Briskin

you?”
    Trouble?
Honora looked blankly at the powdered, sympathetic face.
    “Sitting on the nest,” Vi added.
    “You mean having a baby?”
    “Don’t let it throw you, kid.” Vi glanced around, then whispered, “I know a doctor.”
    “It’s nothing like that,” Honora protested.
    Vi’s sympathetic disbelief showed. “Kid, I’m on your side.”
    “Honestly, Vi, he’s not even exactly a friend.”
    “Whatever he is, he ain’t worth an hour and a half’s crying. No man is.”
    *   *   *
    Honora plodded through the day, blocking out the scene with an effort that brought on a monster of a headache. She finished Vi’s aspirin while she changed to go home.
    As she went out the door she glimpsed Curt lounging against one of the Tuscan pillars of the Stock Exchange. Seeing her, he waved. She hurried around the corner, each step jolting inside her head. He must have run across the busy intersection of Pine and Sansome. She heard a horn blare behind her.
    Catching up, he said, “How about a lift home.”
    “I’m not going home”, she said stiffly.
    “Why not? You look beat.”
    “Joss has a four o’clock appointment at the dentist’s and I’m meeting her.”
    “I’ll drop you off there.”
    “No thank you.” She headed in the direction of Telegraph Hill.
    He kept up with her. “My car’s up the block.”
    “What do you want?” she asked in a low, fierce voice.
    “I’m offering you transportation, Honora.”
    “Why aren’t you at Talbott’s? Why should you take me anywhere? You never have before. Now you know I’m a waitress d’you think I’m easy?”
    Their hurrying steps faltered and they turned to each other, wary as fencing duelists. A muscle moved in his eyelid, an intimation of hurt. Curt Ivory hurt?
    She made an inarticulate sound in her throat. “I’m sorry. I have a rotten headache.”
    “I get them, too,” he said.
    His yellow Buick convertible was parked just ahead of them. He opened the door.
    “It’s really not—”
    “Honora, will you just shut up and get in.”
    Unable to look at him, she obeyed. When he was behind the wheel, she murmured the address on Washington Square so quietly that he had to ask her to repeat it.
    Maneuvering through the traffic, he didn’t attempt conversation. She held two fingers to her left temple. Her lack of experience withmen and her fastidiousness about sex had protected her, but now she wondered if she had blurted out the truth. It hardly seemed Curt’s style to hang around like a stage-door Johnny, but on the other hand, why had he waited for her? She glanced at his profile. Mouth folded tight, high cheekbones raised so that his eye was narrowed, aloof. Not the look of a man intent on seduction. Beyond that she could not read his expression. He might have been angry, resentful, bored or simply concentrating on driving.
    Dr. Brady practiced above the drugstore in Washington Square. Curt drew up and glanced at his watch. “On the dot,” he said.
    “This was most kind of you,” she said, then blurted, “Listen, Curt, Daddy and Joscelyn don’t know where I work, they
do
think it’s at a brokerage . . .” Her voice trailed away and she knew her face was crimson.
    “I understand,” he said quietly.
    In the waiting room, Joscelyn was frowning over an illustrated history book: American History was her one weak subject. “You look like the wrath of God,” she said.
    “Headache. Joss, I’m sorry, I can’t stay with you.”
    After paying the nurse, Honora trudged home, swallowed three more aspirin and filled the yellow-stained tub, washing her hair under the long-necked faucet, sitting until the soap-scummed water was cold. Crawling into bed, she tried to read but the library novel couldn’t raise her from the slough of despond. Sheshivered under the eiderdown. Life stretched ahead of her, a bleak cement track of hateful work.
    She used her headache to beg off making supper and coming to the table.
    It was after eight when