George, therefore, naturally had a high standard. Something special was required to win his trained approval. And she was coming to meet him at a fashionable restaurant in a black-and-white check suit that was not only hideous but hardly respectable.
It was just the sort of suit that girls wore to whom strange men on street corners said: “Hello, kiddo!” It was a flashy, giggling, sideways-glancing, chorus-of-a-burlesque-show sort of suit. It was the outer covering of a cutie and a baby doll.
As she got off the car she saw him waiting outside the restaurant. He looked superb. George was always a great dresser. He was tall and slim, and resembled those divine youths you see in tailors’ advertisements, who stand with bulging bosoms and ingrowing waists, saying to their college chums, as they light a cigarette: “Yes, my dear chap, I always buy the Kute-kut Klothes, each suit guaranteed for one year on the easy-payment system. A fellow must look decent!”
She hurried toward him with a sinking heart, gamely forcing her face into a smile.
“Here I am, dear!”
“Hello!” said George.
Was his voice cold? Was his manner distant?
“Many happy returns of the day!”
“Thanks!”
Yes. His voice was cold. His manner was distant. And a dull disapproving look was in his eyes.
There was a momentary silence. They stood aside to allow a stream of diners to go in. Rosie looked at the women. They were walking reproaches to her. They were smart. They glittered. A sudden panic came upon her. Something told her that George would be ashamed to be seen with her in a place like the McAstor.
“I say, Rosie!”
There was embarrassment in George’s voice. He gave a swift look over his shoulder into the crowded prismatic lobby of the restaurant.
“I don’t know that I’m so crazy to have dinner here,” he said awkwardly. “How about going somewhere else?”
The blow had fallen. And, like most blows that fall after we have been anticipating them, it had an unexpected effect on its victim. A moment before she had felt humble, ashamed of herself. But now, when George had come out into the open and as good as told her in so many words that he shrank from being seen with her in public, a fighting spirit she had never suspected herself of possessing flamed into being. All her unhappiness crystallized into a furious resentment. She hated George, who had humiliated her.
“I don’t mind,” she said.
“Darned noisy crowded place,” said George. “I’ve heard the service is bad too.”
She despised him now, besides hating him. It was pitiful to see him standing there, mumbling transparent lies to try to justify himself.
“Shall we go to Giuseppe’s?” she asked coldly.
The question was a test. Giuseppe’s was where they always went, one of the four hundred and eighty-seven Italian restaurants in the neighborhood of Times Square which provided sixty-cent table-d’hote dinners for the impecunious. The food was plentiful, especially the soup, which was a meal in itself, and they had always enjoyed themselves there; but if George could countenance the humble surroundings of Giuseppe’s on his birthday, on the night they had been looking forward to for weeks as a grand occasion, then George must indeed have sunk low. For George to answer “Yes” was equivalent to an admission that he had feet of clay.
“Yes,” answered George; “that’s just what I’d like.”
Rosie put her finger in her mouth and bit it hard. It was the only way she could keep from crying.
Dinner was a miserable affair. The constraint between them was like a wall of fog. It was perhaps fortunate that they had decided to go to Giuseppe’s, for there conversation is not essential. What with the clatter of cutlery, the babel of talk, the shrill cries of the Italian waitresses conveying instruction and reproof to an unseen cook, who replied with what sounded like a recitative passage from grand opera, and the deep gurgling of the soup dispatchers, there is plenty of tumult to cover any lack of small talk.
Rosie, listening to the uproar, with the chair of the diner behind her joggling her back and the elbow of the diner beside her threatening her ribs, remembered with bitterness that George had called the McAstor a noisy crowded place.