“I hope you don’t mean to offend me, but you shouldn’t ask me anything like that. I think I am doing very wrong in even talking to you, but I can’t help it. There was something about you when I passed by that seemed to attract me. I have done something to-night that I have never been guilty of before, and never will be again. I don’t object to wine, because we have it in the house, but I didn’t think you would ask me to go to a common saloon with you—a place I have never been in in my life. But I suppose I deserve it for speaking to you the way I did, and for walking with you the way I am now.”
He protests, he apologizes, and he feels that he has made a great mistake. He is humiliated beyond expression. Here is a nice little woman with a husband and a baby, who has permitted him to accost her on the street, probably because she felt that she needed some human companionship, and he has insulted her by asking her to go to a public place and drink a bottle of wine with him, just as if she were a woman of the streets. He feels that he cannot do enough to make amends to her.
“I don’t believe,” she says, sweetly, “that you intended to hurt my feelings for a moment. Let you and I be simply good friends. We are both a little lonesome; let us spend a pleasant evening together, for it isn’t likely that we will ever meet again after to-night. We will act as if we were brother and sister; but if you would really like a bottle of wine I have a lot home that Jack says is pretty good, and we can go there and be all by ourselves.”
But a moment later she repents and says it will not do at all, for suppose any of the neighbors should see them going in, what then?
He clutches at the idea like a drowning man clutches at a straw, for this is a wonderfully nice girl he has met in this accidental way, and he would like to become better acquainted.
So he begins to coax, and she laughingly refuses to listen. He pleads, argues and promises, and then he stops in a shop and blows himself to a five-pound box of candy for the baby—and her.
When he peels the bill off a roll that would choke an elephant she sizes it all up out of the tail of her eye, and makes a mental calculation as to how much is there.
She’s just a trifle more endearing to him after that, and it strikes him that she is getting a little reckless.
“Come on,” she says, quite gayly, and with an affectation of sportiness, “I will take you up to the house, but you must promise me on your word of honor that you won’t remember the street or the number and that you’ll never try to see me again. Remember, this is just for one evening, and I don’t want you to think I am anything but what I seem.”
“I could never think that,” he says, quite soberly.