“Shall we go down?” she said.
“Yes, do let us.”
As she moved to go she looked into the glass. She could not help doing that. He noticed it, and thought:
“I wonder why she has begun making her face up like this?”
He did not like it. He preferred her as she had been when he had first come to her house on an autumn evening. To him there was something almost distressing in this change which he noticed specially to-night. And her look into the glass had shown him that she was preoccupied about her appearance. Such a preoccupation on her part seemed foreign to her character as he had conceived of it. Her greatest charm had been her extraordinary lack, or apparent lack, of all self-consciousness. She had never seemed to bother about herself, to be thinking of the impression she was making on others.
But she was certainly looking very handsome.
She put on a fur. They got into the cab and drove to Soho.
Craven had ordered the table in the window to be reserved for them. The restaurant was fairly, but not quite, full. The musicians were in their accustomed places looking very Italian. The lustrous padrona smiled a greeting to them from her counter. Their bright-eyed waitress hurried up and welcomed them in Italian. Vesuvius erupted at them from the walls. There was a cozy warmth in the unpretentious room, an atmosphere of careless intimacy and good fellowship.
“Let me take off your fur!”
She slipped out of it, and he hung it up on a hook among hats and coats which looked as if they could never have anything to do with it.