"Birds and flowers and sweet smells!" he told her. He had been a bootblack in New York, at first. But he liked San Francisco better. He talked about America and democracy.
"We Greeks, you understand, we come from a free people." And he began to revive the glories of ancient Greece. It was plain to Claire that these people were living in retrospection, harking back to a racial past very much in the fashion of her mother trying to gather warmth from the memory of a former opulence.
Claire rose from the table, amazed at the extent of the meal which she had been tempted to eat. But it had all been so frank and friendly and lacking any savor of condescension. She did not make the mistake of fancying that just this thing would be a regular occurrence, but there was a certain beauty about the humanness of this welcome that had been given her, as if the rite of breaking bread had suddenly made her a part of a large family.
Since there was nothing to do, she left early, at ten o'clock. The waiter followed her to the door.
"In a day or two things will be different," he assured her.
"What is your name?" she asked.
"Demetrio—the same as Jimmy." He threw back his head, smiling.
She said good night and started off. Third Street was crowded. There was scarcely a woman in sight. Men, men everywhere. And yet she felt not the slightest fear. All evening she had felt detached, remote, cut off from the past, as one is cut off from a familiar view by a sharp turn in the road. But as she swung into Market Street and crossed over to the north side again the chill of reality swept over her. She was coming back to familiar scenes, familiar problems, familiar griefs. She began to think about her mother's hopeless condition, the fact that Mrs. Finnegan was preparing to move away.
"She's tired of having mother on her hands so often," flashed through Claire's mind. "She's moving to get out of it gracefully. Why did I permit such a thing?"
Her cheeks burned with the shame of it. She would have to talk to Nellie Whitehead about getting some one to come in and sit with her mother at night. Nellie Whitehead would know of somebody; she always was equal to any emergency.... She needed to have her shoes resoled, and her gloves were in a dreadful state. Well, fortunately, she would not have to keep up much of an appearance now. Twenty dollars a week—eighty dollars a month—she began to lay out plans for its expenditure. She owed two months to the butcher, and even the grocery bill had been long overdue. And there was Nellie Whitehead—she should have paid Nellie back. But there seemed always to have been something else more pressing. She thought all these things out swiftly, darting from one subject to another in a feverish anxiety to fill her mind with food for impersonal thought.