“Look here, Miss O’Mara,” he had got her alone for a second. “Look here, will you come out to dinner with me some time? And the theatre?”
“Love to.”
“When?” He was actually trembling.
“Tonight.” He had an important engagement. He cast it out of his life.
“Tonight! That’s grand. Where do you want to dine? The Casino?” The smartest club in Chicago; a little pink stucco Italian box of a place on the Lake Shore Drive. He was rather proud of being in a position to take her there as his guest.
“Oh, no, I hate those arty little places. I like dining in a hotel full of all sorts of people. Dining in a club means you’re surrounded by people who’re pretty much alike. Their membership in the club means they’re there because they are all interested in golf, or because they’re university graduates, or belong to the same political party or write, or paint, or have incomes of over fifty thousand a year, or something. I like ’em mixed up, higgledy-piggledy. A dining room full of gamblers, and insurance agents, and actors, and merchants, thieves, bootleggers, lawyers, kept ladies, wives, flaps, travelling men, millionaires—everything. That’s what I call dining out. Unless one is dining at a friend’s house, of course.” A rarely long speech for her.
“Perhaps,” eagerly, “you’ll dine at my little apartment some time. Just four or six of us, or even—”
“Perhaps.”
“Would you like the Drake tonight?”
“It looks too much like a Roman bath. The pillars scare me. Let’s go to the Blackstone. I’ll always be sufficiently from Texas to think the Blackstone French room the last word in elegance.”
They went to the Blackstone. The head waiter knew him. “Good evening, Mr. DeJong.” Dirk was secretly gratified. Then, with a shock, he realized that the head waiter was grinning at Dallas and Dallas was grinning at the head waiter. “Hello, André,” said Dallas.
“Good evening, Miss O’Mara.” The text of his greeting was correct and befitting the head waiter of the French room at the Blackstone. But his voice was lyric and his eyes glowed. His manner of seating her at a table was an enthronement.
At the look in Dirk’s eyes, “I met him in the army,” Dallas explained, “when I was in France. He’s a grand lad.”
“Were you in—what did you do in France?”
“Oh, odd jobs.”
Her dinner gown was very smart, but the pink ribbon strap of an undergarment showed untidily at one side. Her silk brassiere, probably. Paula would have—but then, a thing like that was impossible in Paula’s perfection of toilette. He loved the way the gown cut sharply away at the shoulder to show her firm white arms. It was dull gold, the colour of her hair. This was one Dallas. There were a dozen—a hundred. Yet she was always the same. You never knew whether you were going to meet the gamin of the rumpled smock and the smudged face or the beauty of the little fur jacket. Sometimes Dirk thought she looked like a Swede hired girl with those high cheek bones of hers and her deep-set eyes and her large capable hands. Sometimes he thought she looked like the splendid goddesses you saw in paintings—the kind with high pointed breasts and gracious gentle pose—holding out a horn of plenty. There was about her something genuine and earthy and elemental. He noticed that her nails were short and not well cared for—not glittering and pointed and cruelly sharp and horridly vermilion, like Paula’s. That pleased him, too, somehow.
“Some oysters?” he suggested. “They’re perfectly safe here. Or fruit cocktail? Then breast of guinea hen under glass and an artichoke—”
She looked a little worried. “If you—suppose you take that. Me, I’d like a steak and some potatoes au gratin and a salad with Russian—”
“That’s fine!” He was delighted. He doubled that order and they consumed it with devastating thoroughness. She ate rolls. She ate butter. She made no remarks about the food except to say, once, that it was good and that she had forgotten to eat lunch because she had been so busy working. All this Dirk found most restful and refreshing. Usually, when you dined in a restaurant with a woman she said, “Oh, I’d love to eat one of those crisp little rolls!”
You said, “Why not?”
Invariably the answer to this was, “I daren’t! Goodness! A half pound at least. I haven’t eaten a roll with butter in a year.”
Again you said, “Why not?”
“Afraid I’ll get fat.”
Automatically, “You! Nonsense. You’re just right.”
He was bored with these women who talked about their weight, figure, lines. He thought it in bad taste. Paula was always rigidly refraining from this or that. It made him uncomfortable to sit at the table facing her; eating his thorough meal while she nibbled fragile curls of Melba toast, a lettuce leaf, and half a sugarless grapefruit. It lessened his enjoyment of his own oysters, steak, coffee. He thought that she always eyed his food a little avidly, for all her expressed indifference to it. She was looking a little haggard, too.
“The theatre’s next door,” he said. “Just a step. We don’t have to leave here until after eight.”
“That’s nice.” She had her cigarette with her coffee in a mellow sensuous atmosphere of enjoyment. He was talking about himself a good deal. He felt relaxed, at ease, happy.
“You know I’m an architect—at least, I was one. Perhaps that’s why I like to hang around your shop so. I get sort of homesick for the pencils and the drawing board—the whole thing.”
“Why did you give it up, then?”
“Nothing in it.”
“How do you mean—nothing in it?”
“No money. After the war nobody was building. Oh, I suppose if I’d hung on—”
“And then you became a banker, h’m? Well, there ought to be money enough in a bank.”
He was a little nettled. “I wasn’t a banker—at first. I
