The feeling passed, and anyway I couldn't get out without squeezing by him and I didn't want to touch him any more than I would a spider.
"I was calculating how much of it I could eat," I said. "My folks don't like me to dine out so when I do I try to catch up with all the times I've refused."
"Come along then," he said, stepping back from the doorway. "I know a bully little joint not far from here. You can catch up there if you've been refusing dinners since the first telephone was installed."
So off we trotted into the night, I and the murderer!
Can you see into my mind—it was boiling with thoughts like a Hammam bath with steam? What would Soapy say? He'd be raging, but after all he couldn't do anything more than rage. You can't divorce a woman for dining with a murderer, especially if she only does it once. Mr. Whitney'd be all right. If I got what I intended to get he'd pass me compliments that would take O'Mally's pride down several pegs. As for myself—Tony Ford wouldn't want to murder me. There was nothing in it, and judging by the pleasant things he said as we walked to the restaurant, you'd think to keep me alive and well was the dearest wish of his heart.
The restaurant was one of those quiet foreign ones, in an old dwelling house, sandwiched in among shops and offices. It was a decent place—I'd been there for lunch with Iola—in the daytime full of business people, and at night having the sort of crowd that gathers where boarding houses and downtown apartments and hotels for foreigners give up their dead.
We found a table in a corner of the front room, with the wall to one side of us and the long curtains of the window behind me. There were a lot of people and a few waiters, one of whom Mr. Ford summoned with a haughty jerk of his head. Then he sprawled grandly in his chair with menus and wine lists, telling the waiter how to serve things that were hot and ice things that were cold till you'd suppose he'd been a chef along with all his other jobs. He put on a great deal of side, like he was a cattle king from Chicago trying to impress a Pilgrim Father from Boston. The only way it impressed me was to make me think a gunman with blood on his soul wasn't so different from an innocent clerk with nothing to trouble him but the bill at the end.
As he was doing this I took off my veil and gloves, careful to pull off my wedding ring—I wasn't going to have that sidetracking him—and thinking how I'd begin.
We were through the soup and on the fish when I decided the time was ripe to ring the bell and start. I did it quietly:
"I guess you've got a new place?"