THE TWENTY AND ONE NIGHTS
Hester and Carrie, childhood friends, now both separated from their husbands, share a large old city house. Their orderly lives are interrupted one evening by Carrie's ex-husband, Ned—now married and moved to a further suburb—who distractedly gets off the train at his old stop and comes to the house, which is in the same neighborhood where he lived previously with Carrie and their children. He is laughed at and invited to stay for dinner by Hester, so he stays, meaning to proceed home on a later train. Instead, he falls ill and stays three weeks. Carrie ignores him, begins an affair with a younger man. Hester gives him her bed, jollies him out of his hysteria with stories of her suburban life with the husband she has left. But she runs out of stories, joins him in her bed, bringing on a nervous crisis of her own
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