Character Analysis
Twenty-eight-year-old Mrs. Marie Jencks also worked at the auto insurance claims agency with the teenaged Slocum. She was tall, blond, and generous of bosom, but she wasn't as pretty as Virginia.
Though married, Marie was fooling around with the twenty-one-year-old Tom. Slocum found himself vicariously fascinated by their relationship, a "fantasy fulfilled (although for somebody else)" (3.24). Marie and Tom would do it down in the storeroom together, the very place where Slocum had always wanted to do it with Virginia. Nobody thought to get a hotel or something?