The Englishman then left the room, shaking from head to foot.
His wife, however, remained staring at her plate. By and by Fred brought her a stewed fish with which she began to fill her baleful gizzard.
I would have thought—I would have bet—that this was the end of such things. The tray, alone, would have done as the month's quota for this proper restaurant.
I was wrong.
Hardly had the Englishman departed—hardly had his wife commenced to make slushing sounds with the cream sauce on her fish—hardly had I dried my tears—when the corner of the eye opposite the one that had caught sight of the teetering tray drew my attention in its new direction.
This was toward the bar.
Here Mrs. Doffin was sitting at her regular table.
She had been sitting there, lunch and dinner, when I had first entered the Knight's Bar in 1937. A tall, narrow woman with dyed red hair, who was given to wearing witches' hats—such hats as women wore in Merlin's day—round and pointed. A stovepipe of a woman with a face on which a bleached fuzz grew, and eyes that resembled spoon-backs.
Year in, year out, the four seasons through, Mrs. Doffin had five Martinis for lunch, five for dinner, five in the evening after dinner, and refreshments in her room, between-times. Some ten million dollars lay to her account in various banks, I understood, but, since the death of her husband in 1932, she had devoted herself entirely to one form of enjoyment, if the pointed hats be excepted.