She brought her mental vision back from this upon herself and felt shaken and slightly sick. Seeing beyond the circle of her own experience and sensation for the first time, she would have said to any companion who might have shared her thoughts, “No wonder Dominick didn’t get on with me!” For a dispassionately-contemplative moment she saw herself in Dominick’s eyes; she saw their married life as it had been to him. She felt sorry for both of them—for him in his forced acquiescence with the conditions around him, for herself because of her ignorance of all he had wanted and expected.
“I couldn’t be any different,” she whispered to herself, “that’s the way I am.”
She never could be any different. She was one kind of woman and Rose Cannon was another, and Dominick belonged to Rose Cannon’s kind. She did not know that it was so much better than her kind but it was different. They made her feel like an outsider in a distant world, and the feeling gave her a sensation of deadly depression. The burning heat of resentment that had made her speak to Rose was gone. All the burning heats and angers of the last two months seemed to belong to the past. An icy, nostalgic ache of loneliness had hold of her. The accustomed sense of intimacy and warm, enjoying interest in the world—what we mean when we talk of “living”—had been completely drawn out of her.
The cold, biting in to her marrow, at last woke her to a realization of her surroundings, and she sat upright, looking blinkingly to the right and left. The half-lit plaza lay like a lake of shadow surrounded by a circlet of light and girdled by noise. It was like the brightness and animation of the world flowing round her but not touching her, as she sat alone in the darkness.
She rose suddenly, determined to escape from her gloomy thoughts, and walked toward the upper end of the square, directing her steps to the Spanish and Italian section of the city which is called the Latin Quarter. She walked slowly, not knowing where to go, only determined that she would not go home. She thought for a moment of her sisters’, where she could have dinner and find the cheer of congenial society. But on consideration she felt that this, too, was more than she could just now bear. They would torment her with questions and she felt in no mood to put them off or to be confidential. Finally she remembered a Mexican restaurant, to visit which had at one time been a fashion. She had been there with Hazel and Josh, and once in a party with some of the bank people. She knew where the place was and felt that she could dine there with no fear of encountering any one she knew.
With an objective point in view, her step gained decision, and she moved forward briskly, leaving the plaza and plunging into the congeries of picturesque streets which harbor a swarming foreign population. The lights of shops and open stalls fell out into the fog, transforming it into thick, churning currents of smoky pallor. Wet walls and sidewalks showed a gold veneer, and lingering drops, trembling on cornices, hung like tiny globes of thin yellow glass.
People and things looked magnified and sometimes horrible seen through this mysterious, obscuring medium. Once behind a pane of glass she saw lines of detached, staring eyes, fastened glaringly on her as she advanced. It was the display in an optician’s show-window, where glass eyes were disposed in fanciful lines, like a decoration. She looked at them askance, feeling that there was something sinister in their wide, unwinking scrutiny. She hurried by the market stalls, where the shawled figures of women stood huddled round the butcher’s block. They looked as if they might be grouped round a point of interest, bending to stare at something lying there, something dreadful, like a corpse, Berny thought.
When she saw the Mexican restaurant she felt relieved. The strange atmospheric conditions seemed to have played upon her nerves and she was glad to get somewhere where she could find warmth and light and people. The place, a little shabby house dating from the era of the projecting shingle roof and encircling balcony, stood on a corner with windows on two streets. It was built upon a slope so sharp that the balcony, which in front skirted the second story, in the back was on a level with the sidewalk. The bright light of gas-jets, under shades of fluted white china, fell over the contents of the show-window. They were not attractive. A dish of old and shriveled oranges stood between a plate of tamales and another of red and green peppers. There were many flies in the window, and, chilled by the cold, they stood along the inside of the glass in a state of torpor.
Berny pushed open the door and entered. The front part of the place was used as a grocery store and had a short counter at one side, behind which stood shelves piled high with the wares demanded by the Mexican and Spanish population. Back of this were the tables of the restaurant. The powerful, aromatic odors of the groceries blended with the even more powerful ones of the Mexican menu. The room was close and hot. In a corner, his back braced against the wall, a Spaniard, with inky hair and a large expanse of white shirt bosom, was languidly picking at a guitar.
Berny knew that there was an inner sanctum for the guests that preferred more secluded quarters, and walked past the counter and between the tables. An arched opening connected with this room. Coarse, dirty, lace curtains hung in the archway and, looped back against gilt hooks, left a space through which a glimpse of the interior was vouchsafed to the diners without. It was smaller than the restaurant proper, and was fitted up with an attempt at elegance. Lace curtains—also coarse and dirty—veiled the windows, and two large mirrors, with tarnished and fly-spotted gilt frames, hung on the wall opposite the entrance.