"What keeps you so late now?"
"I guess he just forgets to let me down. He forgets to go out himself, I think."
The waiter brought the soup, a watery looking fluid in which floated a tomato and an onion in partial dissolution. He placed beside the plate a dingy blue check which bore in large print 10c.
"When I'm there a month, I'm going to ask him to let me down every day at a regular hour," she went on. "I'm only there a week now, so I wouldn't ask him yet."
She tasted the soup, but it was apparently not to her liking, or else, as she had said, her appetite had gone when the first feeling of hunger had passed. She glanced at the dirty blue check which committed her to her choice for better or worse, and then tried another spoonful of soup.
"I used to take a cup of coffee and a Charlotte 'roosh' every day, but my mother said I'd starve. She told me I'd got to have soup, it was more stren'thening."
"She was quite right, of course."
"But what's the use of ordering it if you can't eat it after all?"
She regarded the plate disconsolately. A little rallying induced her to make another effort. Then she gave it up entirely.
"I wonder what my mother would say if she could see me now!"