She turned on me her great dark eyes, with their flat curve of shadow accenting her sadness.
"I'm sure you are very kind," she said simply. "An' I should be pleased, I'm sure."
I rose, hesitating, longing to say what I had in mind.
"I'd really like your opinion," I said, "on rather a new salad I'm trying. Now would you not—"
"A salad?" Mis' Merriman repeated. "The chief," she said reflectively, "was very partial to all green salads. I don't think men usually care for them the way he did."
"Dear Mrs. Merriman," said I at this, "a cup of bouillon and a bit of chicken breast and a drop of creamed cauliflower—"
"Oh," she murmured, "really, I couldn't think—"
And when I had made my cordial insistence she looked up at me for a moment solemnly, over her crape fan. I thought that her eyes with that flat, underlying curve of shadow were as if tears were native to them. Her grief and the usages of grief had made of her some one other than her first self, some one circumscribed, wary of living.
"Oh," she said wistfully, "I ain't had anything like that since I went into mourning. If you don't think it would be disrespectful to him—?"
"I am certain that it would not be so," I assured her, and construed her doubting silence as capitulation.