“Oh, sure.” Robert Holton folded his paper and laid it on the table. She watched him as he drank the orange juice.
“Sour, isn’t it?” she asked.
“A little bit, maybe.”
“I’m glad you’re not going to complain. The rest, they all complain all the time. I get so tired sometimes I could get sick; I get so tired of listening to them.”
“Just don’t take them seriously. Everybody feels awful in the morning. You’ve just been awake longer and you feel better than they do, that’s all.”
Marjorie Ventusa laughed admiringly. “I wouldn’t have ever thought of that,” she said. “You might be right. Anyway a girl gets pretty tired of being shouted at all the time like it’s her fault.”
“Well, just relax. I like the food and the service.”
“Thank you,” she said, trying to sound elegant and funny at the same time.
“When you going to go out dancing with me?” Robert Holton asked, sawing a piece of bacon in half with a blunt knife.
“I’m pretty busy,” she said; she always said that when he asked her that question. He would say it because he thought it was funny and she would answer him as though she thought it was funny too. She wished that he meant it now. She had always wished that he meant it. “I’m pretty busy,” she said. “I got so many people asking to go out with me. You’d have to wait couple of weeks, maybe.”