They exhibited no great interest in society, though each commanded a place there, but they would go to church or theater together, and they were much addicted to luncheons.  She would come down town at noon to meet him, and then—­what banquets!  Sometimes they would visit the restaurants where there were fine things, and he would seek to make of her a gourmet.  He taught her the beauties of the bobolink in his later attractive form, the form he assumes when, after having been transformed into a reed bird, he comes back on ice to the region where, in the midsummer, he disported himself, and stirs the heart of the good liver, as in June he did the heart of the poet.  He taught her the difference between Roquefort cheese, that green garden of toothsome fungi, that crumbly, piquant apotheosis of the best that comes from curd, and all other cheeses, and taught, too, the virtues of each in its own way.  She learned the adjuncts of black coffee and hard crackers.  She even learned to criticise a claret, and once, with Harlson, she tested a pousse cafe, but only once.  He didn’t approve of it, he said, for ladies.  And, besides, a pousse cafe was not of merit in itself.  It was but a thing spectacular.

And in the matter of made dishes from the man about town she acquired much wisdom.

The man in his great happiness was buoyant and fantastic, and well it was that the woman, too, possessed the sense of humor which makes the world worth occupancy, and that the two could understand together.  He was but a foolish boy in this, his delicious period of probation.

And she was but a loving woman who had given her heart to him, who understood him, and who, in a woman’s way, was of his mood.  It was an idyl of the clever.

At the more modest restaurants were the lunches of these two the most delightful.  He would, somehow, find queer little places where all was clean and the cooking good, but far away from the haunts of men, that is, far away from the haunts of the men and women they knew, and there the two would have great feasts.  At one unpretending place he had one day found pork and beans,—­not the molasses-colored abomination ordinarily sold in town, but the white beans, baked in a deep pan, with the slashed piece of pork browned in the middle of the dish,—­and this place became a great resort for them.  They would sit at a small table, and have the beans brought on, and mustard of the sharpest and shrewdest, and dishes such as formed a halo about the beans, which were the central figure, and then would they eat, being healthy, and look into each other’s face, and riot in present happiness, having certain brains and being in love.  The very rudeness of it pleased him mightily.

One evening they had dined together.  She had been shopping or doing what it is that women do down town of afternoons, and he had met her at the close of business, and they had eaten together as usual, and when they emerged into the open air it was but to learn that the mercury had dropped some few degrees, and that the jacket she wore was light for the occasion.  She became cold before her home was reached, and he was troubled.