So she tapped on the glass and told him to let her out, please, at the drug-store, as she had some marketing to do.
“Sure, Miss,” said the chauffeur.
Kedzie liked that “Miss.” It was ever so much prettier than “Mizzuz.” She bought some postage-stamps at the drug-store and some pork chops at the butcher's and went down the street and up the stairs to her life-partner, dog on him!
Gilfoyle was just finishing a poem, and he was the least attractive thing in the world to her, next to his poem. He was in his sock feet; his suspenders were down—he would wear the hateful things! his collar was off, his sleeves up; his detachable cuffs were detached and stuck on the mantelpiece; his hair was crazy, and he had ink smears on his nose.
“Don't speak to me!” he said, frantically, as he thumped the table with finger after finger to verify the meter.
“No danger!” said Kedzie, and went into the bedroom to look over her scant wardrobe and choose the least of its evils to wear.
She shook her head at her poverty and went to the kitchen to cook lunch for her man. He followed her and read her his poem while she slammed the oven door of the gas-stove at the exquisitely wrong moments. She broke his heart by her indifference and he tore up the poem, carefully saving the pieces.
“A whole day's work and five dollars gone!” he groaned. He was so sulky that he forgot to ask her why she had come home so early. He assumed that she had been turned off. She taxed her ingenuity to devise some way of getting to the dinner with Ferriday without letting Gilfoyle know of it. At last she made so bold as to tell her husband that she thought she would drop in at her old boarding-house and stay for dinner if she got asked.
“I'm sick of my cooking,” she said.
“So am I, darling. Go by all means!” said Gilfoyle, who owed her one for the poem.