I'd timed my departure from the office wrong, and had suffered through the scary part of the bad traffic. Traffic doesn't slow in the evenings until somebody in the growing crowd makes that first mistake, and I could feel for ten minutes the likelihood that person was close. My nerves were a bit jangled as I reached for the door.

She surprised me by yanking it open, meeting me on the threshold. I wasn't going to get around her - she'd struck a pose and was smiling, exuding some mixture of "ain't I pretty?" and "glad you're here!" We flowed into the hug, letting me drain some of my tension into the squeeze of it, and I murmured the compliments and pleasantries you'd expect as we moved ourselves in out of the cold.

And people still wonder why I don't go straight home from work.

I tried my best to pay that back, thinking of ways I could be kind, spending time in search of her smile. I found that I was gladdened when we shared it. I was reminded of a throwaway passage from a favorite novel as I pondered the magic of this, the reasons that those few moments lifted my spirits.

When I did arrive home, much better balanced that I otherwise would have, I was graceful about what little reception I received. Collecting a smile or two on the way to the bookshelf, I took down the proper hardback, and flipped casually through pages until I again found it.

No man was more comprehensively doomed than him whose chief source of gratification was making favorable impressions on some particular woman.

It's not that I don't like going home, or am anything short of eager to ransack that place for whatever smiles can be had there.

It's just that I feel much better about it when I'm not doomed.