"Oh, it isn't the café side of it," Claire protested; "it's the ... the...."
"The Greek side of it, eh? Well, as a matter of fact, Robson, I guess a Greek café ain't any worse than what my little friend calls 'one of them gilded vice-cages....' And even at that, any girl who lasted six weeks in the private office of Sawyer Flint, Esquire, has run up against as much fancy roller-skating as she's apt to. If you managed to keep your balance on a slippery floor like that, I guess you'll be good for a spin on the asphalt pavement any day in the week. It may be a little bit rougher, but it ain't a bit more dangerous. In fact, I shouldn't wonder whether there wasn't a good deal more elbow room."
Nellie Whitehead leaned back again and closed her eyes. Claire was silent. There was no logical answer to her friend's shrewd estimate, but prejudice dies hard and Claire was still in the bondage of a vague distrust for the unknown.
"Good Lord! I know how you feel!" Miss Whitehead went on with a sudden genial air of understanding. "I remember when I had my first Italian dinner at Lombardi's. I thought the man who invited me had a grudge against my appetite. Honest, in those days if you mentioned spaghetti most folks thought you were talking about a deadly disease. And now...." Nellie Whitehead finished with an eloquent and descriptive sweep of hands.
Claire put a thoughtful finger to her lips and was silent. After all, what did it matter where she worked or what she did? She felt a dangerous indifference, a negative contempt for life.
"I guess you're right," she said, finally, with a sudden hardening of voice that made Nellie Whitehead look up quickly. "One can get accustomed to almost anything. Where did you say the café was?"
Claire went next morning before nine o'clock to look up the Greek café on Third Street. It was a raw, blustering, traditional March day, and she pulled her shabby cloak about her in a vain attempt to shut out a chill which seemed somehow to be clutching at her very heart. It was years since she had ventured south of Market, and she was surprised to find its old atmosphere quite vanished. She remembered the section of the town beyond Mission Street as a squalid mass of tumbledown houses out of which issued a perennial stream of shawl-cloaked women carrying empty white pitchers to the nearest corner grocery and retracing their steps with the pitchers half hidden in the folds of the aforesaid shawls, from which dripped betraying flecks of foam. Third Street was now by no means an opulent thoroughfare, but it had the virtue of a certain cheap newness. The frowsy women were no more. It was undeniably a street of men, stretching out in a succession of lodging-houses, saloons, and cheap eating-places. Past Howard Street the Greek coffee-houses began. Claire looked in at them curiously. In the drowse of morning they seemed very lifeless and still. She noted, as she passed, the prim rows of marble-topped tables with their old-fashioned call-bells for signaling the waiter, the window-plants turning sickly green faces toward the sun, the line of Oriental water-pipes setting in their racks over the coffee-shelves. One café seemed very much like another, and in spite of the extreme simplicity of their equipment they contrived to shed an air fascinating and strange.
Claire hurried on, eager to be through with the suspense of this plunge into bizarre life which she could not realize would ever be her portion. She was carrying the whole thing through in a spirit of bravado, and she was conscious that her hopes leaned unmistakably toward finding the position filled or her qualifications not up to the mark. Her glimpses into the coffee-houses led her to expect that the café she was in search of might be some such place. She was surprised then to come upon a totally different institution in the shape of what appeared to be a saloon as she halted before the number that corresponded to the address on the card she was carrying. Café Ithaca—she read the sign twice before venturing through the swinging doors.
A long mahogany-colored bar ran the full length of the room; small tables fully set for a meal filled the rest of the floor space. Claire decided at once upon retreat. But suddenly at the back of the room a green curtain parted and a man came toward her. He had a pale, round face and a mass of black hair that reminded Claire of pictures of John the Baptist.