"Can you come?"
"Yes, certainly."
"Splendid," she said. "The pre-view will be at 7:30, but can't you get here earlier so we can have dinner together and talk?"
"At six, then," he suggested.
"At six," she assented.
He wondered why it was he felt relieved when she said that Gibson would not be there with them.
It was dusk when he reached the studio a few minutes before six. She had waited for him in her dressing room to which he was escorted by the maid.
"There's a little place a few blocks away where we always go for dinner when we're kept late," she said. "I discovered it myself. I delight in finding little out-of-the-way places to eat. Reggie can't understand it. He's uncomfortable every minute of the time we're there."
"You would have liked my father," he said. "Almost every week he treated mother and me by taking us to dinner at some genuinely picturesque place he had found. Sometimes it would be a little Spanish restaurant in Sonora Town, sometimes an Italian cafe in North Broadway and sometimes a French table de hote, which I liked best. Mother was like you say Gibson is, uncomfortable every minute, but father and I enjoyed it immensely. One night, when mother wasn't with us, we had tamales at one of those wagon lunch places drawn up at the curb near the Plaza and lighted by a sputtering kerosene range and a lantern that gave it an appearance of being a ship's cabin. I'll never forget it."
"You miss your father greatly, don't you?" she said. The sympathy in her voice was like soothing music.