After hours the waiter arrived with the roast beef and lima beans.
"I haven't much farther to go," continued the woman. "Thank God, I'm not bound for Chicago."
Clarence found it impossible to eat beneath her gaze.
"I get off at eleven something . . ." he said, "I've forgotten exactly. . . ."
The woman laughed. "Why, so do I! We must be bound for the same place."
For an instant he succumbed to a terrifying suspicion that, in truth, she had marked him for her own. But this idea he dismissed quickly, as utterly improbable. The woman was clearly a lady. She was terribly sure of herself, of keeping things just where she wanted them. She might be a spy, an adventuress. (Ghosts of a thousand cheap magazine stories danced through his brain.) Yet a woman like that, if she were bad, wouldn't be bothering herself with insignificant game like himself. He began to believe that she had been speaking the truth, that she had been driven to address him only out of a vast boredom.
"Perhaps we are," he said, and told her that he was bound for the Town.
"So am I," she replied. "It's the first time I've been back there in years. . . . Maybe you come from the Town?" she continued.
The discovery of this bond helped matters a little. It furnished at least some ground for the stumbling feet of Clarence.
"No, I'm going on business. . . . I've been there before. . . . It's a nice progressive Town, full of booming factories . . . a place to be proud of."
But he found abruptly that he had taken the wrong turning. The stranger was not proud of the Town. "I suppose you might be proud of it, if you like that sort of thing. . . . I find it abominable." For a moment, the bantering, charming, humorous look went out of the eyes behind the veil, supplanted by a sudden sadness. "No," she continued, "I don't like it, though I've no doubt it's very prosperous."
