Sam kept on walking.
“If you do not mind,” he said, “I will pick the place. I want to buy a good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook in the kitchen.”
They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still waiting.
“I thought maybe it was a stall,” she said.
They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms. Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been well cooked.
They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness by the church door, had made an appeal.
She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy’s. Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother’s hands. Now that she sat before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother.
After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.
“Are you going to take me anywhere after this—after we leave here?” she said.
“I am going to take you to the door of your room, that’s all.”