Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 62: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

a 62 BRIAN CLEEVE I waited too, but in a kind of sick despair. Because I not only knew that it was coming, but I knew that Fran knew as well. And I watched her trying not to show it, trying not to believe it, as she walked down the street with her yellow-haired, fine- smiling lover; his feet so light and his face so handsome, and his body so graceful when he moved. He always walked as if he was beginning to dance. Oh God, how I hated him. She’d smile at him, and then lift her head at the street, as if she was defying it, and all the eyes that were watching her; but I could see the shadow of fear round her mouth. And then the day came. Quite suddenly, without any warning, as Fran was standing in the street in the morning sunshine, her head thrown back and her eyes half shut, waiting for the stranger to come to her. He came swinging down the hillside, nothing in his face that was different to any other morning, his eyes smiling and lazy, his hands in his pockets and his shirt collar open to the sunlight. He nodded to old Mr. Clooney and some of the men who were leaning against the wall, waiting for the bar to open, and chucked Fran under the chin with his hand, the way you'd play with a child, or a dog. I think he wanted to’ show the men how she belonged to him. It sounds a trifling sort of a thing to have started a quarrel between a man and a girl, but it was what was behind it that really made the trouble: the knowledge she had-of how little she really meant to him, and the wish he had to be a great man, to have the other men laughing and envying him. It was the same sort of thing that made him so lavish with the free drinks. Maybe, for all his strength and his looks and his dancing, he wasn’t so sure of himself. Maybe if you could see inside any man’s mind, you'd pity him. One of the loafers by the wall sniggered, and even from where I was, I could see Fran colouring. She struck his hand down ~ and said something sharp, and he gave her an answer that made the men leaning along the wall laugh out loud. I found out afterwards that it was then he told her he was going the next day, and that he wouldn’t be bothering about seeing her again. If she hadn’t flared at him, I don’t think he would have told her at all. Just gone and left her to find out for herself. That was what everyone was expecting. But now he threw it at her, like a blow in the face, because she had struck his hand away and shown the loafers that he didn’t own her completely. I saw her go white, and for a long moment she stood quite still, her eyes almost shut, and her hands almost together as if she was going to fold them across her breast. And then she hit Comicooks.Conn % 7 ~_-