Stanley wasn't like that. She could always predict what Stanley was going to do, ever since she first met him.

Except for that one morning. The morning he walked in to announce to her, blushing, that he was married. She thought she was going to die.

She had assumed before then that one day he would ask her to marry him.

Blanche couldn't remember when she had first arrived at this conclusion. She thought it was sometime during the second week she worked for Stanley. It was nothing that he said or did, but it seemed so natural to her that she should be working for him, looking forward to his eventual proposal.

She was thirty-one years old then. Her mother was already considerably concerned over her daughter's future. But Blanche had been able to maintain a serene and assured composure in the face of her widowed mother's continued carping, had been able to resist her urgings to date anyone who offered the slightest possibility of matrimony.

For Blanche, it was only a matter of time before Stanley would propose. It was to be expected that Stanley would be shy, slow in taking such a momentous step. Stanley went along in life, she knew, convinced that he deserved the love and faith of no woman. As a result, he never looked for it.

But one day, she expected, he would somehow discover, without her having to tell him, that there was such a woman in the world; a woman who was willing to give him love, faith, and anything else a woman could give a husband. Indeed, there was a woman who, unasked, had already given him love. Unquestionably, Blanche loved Stanley.