The waiter raised a deprecating shoulder but Mary Louise broke in, "Oh, don't bother! This is all right, Joe." She had already seated herself and was drawing off her gloves. Her face looked hot and weary, and long wisps of hair were clinging damply to her temples.
"Wish we could have had a table over there," indicating two or three vacant ones near the orchestra and the base of the jongleur's operations. "We're out of it here. Well, at any rate, what are you going to have?"
She turned from a weary inspection of adjoining tables. "Oh, anything. Some lemonade, I suppose."
"Don't want to celebrate? This is our first party." His eyes and smile were eager.
"No. Of course not, Joe. You know better than that."
"Two lemonades," he said to the waiter regretfully. Somehow it seemed like a waste of atmosphere, a waste of fuel, pulling a rowboat with a turbine—to be drinking lemonade in a place like this. Many bitter similes occurred to him, but he banished them.
"The old girl looks like a rash, doesn't she?" he said, indicating the singer who was wandering about amongst the tables in another part of the room.
Mary Louise looked at him suspiciously. "How's that?"
"She's a-breakin' out."
Neither paid any further attention to this atrocity; she, because she willed otherwise; he, because he was blissfully unaware.