Melton wore a black cape coat, a dinner coat beneath. Pidge felt as if she had left all her light in the second hall. She was exasperated with herself for pushing past Fanny and not taking the joke gracefully, exasperated with Melton for togging up to come to Harrow Street, to take her to that old eating house. Couldn’t he resist showing off for just one hour?
Some awe seemed to have fallen upon him, or rather between them. In silence they rounded the almost empty curve of Harrow Street, and presently entered the crowds and lights and crashes of trestled Sixth Avenue. On the corner, as they crossed Eighth Street, Pidge heard a newsboy behind say, “There goes a movie actor.” Pidge deeply knew what that grimed child-face had seen.... It troubled Melton to find the restaurant, and she didn’t help, though she had located it a score of times since that other night. At the table, while they waited, he took a fifty-dollar check from his pocket and handed it over, saying that the real part of the favor he would try to pay bit by bit through the years.
“Because I’ll never get very far from you again,” he added queerly. “Find it very funny, don’t you? Sit there chuckling, don’t you? You can laugh, but it’s true.”
Now Melton began to ask for things which weren’t on the bill-of-fare. He told the waitress how things should be prepared and served—this in a side-street eating house, that specialized in beans and encouraged counter trade. There were hard lines around the mouth of the waitress which Melton commented upon, as she turned her back. Pidge had a warning to hold her temper, and yet she would have died first.
“I’ve never worked in a restaurant,” she said, “but I’ve worked in a factory, and I know what those lines come from. They come from dealing with people like you, people who forget where they are, forget what they come for.”
“How do I forget where I am?” he asked.
“Because you don’t know that this is a place where they serve ‘eats.’ ‘Eats’ are cooked all one way. ‘Eats’ are served fast in business hours, and the waiters sit around and gasp the other times, trying to catch up with themselves. And you don’t know where you are, because you try to show these people and me that you’ve seen how it was done in uptown hotels.”
A trace of sullenness showed in his eyes, and then a warmth of almost incredible delight.
“It’s great! I never was scolded in my life!”
“It wasn’t for supper alone—that wasn’t why I fell into the idea of coming here,” she said. “You forget it entirely. You dare to come in a dress suit—here—here!”