In Rinehardt's, one of a thousand such _Rathskeller_ retreats designed for a city that loves to dine in fifteen languages, the noonday cortege of summer widowers had not yet arrived. Waiters moved through the dim, pink-lit gloom, dressing their tables temptingly cool and white, dipping ice out from silver buckets into thin tumblers. They seated themselves beneath a ceiling fan, Miss Becker's taffy-colored scallops stirring in the scurry of air. "Lordy!" she said, closing her eyes and pressing her finger-tips against them, "I wish I could lease this spot for the summer!" He pushed a menu-card toward her. "What'll you have? There's plenty under the 'ready to serve.'" She peeled out of her white-silk gloves. "Some cold cuts and a long ice-tea." He ordered after her and more at length, then lighted a cigarette. "Well?" he said, waving out a match. She leaned forward, already designing with her fork on the table-cloth. "Kess, can you guess?" "Come on with it!" "Have you--noticed anything?" "Say, I'd have a sweet time keeping up with you girls!" She looked at him now evenly between the eyes. "You kept up with me pretty close for three years, didn't you?" "Say, you knew what you were doing!" "I--I'm not so sure of that by a long shot. I--I was fed up with the most devilish kind of promises there are. The kind you was too smart to put in words or--or in writing. You--you only looked 'em." "I suppose you was kidnapped one dark and stormy night while the villain pursued you, eh? Is that it?" "Oh, what's the use--rehashing! After that time at Atlantic City and--and then the--flat, it--it just seemed the way I felt about you then--that nothing you wanted could be wrong. I guess I knew what I was doing all right, or, if I didn't, I ought to have. I was rotten--or I couldn't have done it, I guess. Only, deep inside of me I was waiting and banking on you like--like poor little Cissie is now. And you knew it; you knew it all them three years." "Say, did you get me over here to--" "I only hope to God when you're done with Cissie you'll--" "You let me take care of my own affairs. If it comes right down to it, there's a few things I could tell you, girl, that ain't so easy to listen to. Let's get off the subject while the going's good." "Oh, anybody that plays as safe as you--" He raised his voice, shoving back his chair. "Well, if you want me to clear out of this place quicker than you can bat your eye, you just--" "No, no, Kess! 'Sh-h-h-h!" "If there ever was a girl in my place had a square deal, that girl's been you." "'Square deal!' Because after I held on and--ate out my heart for three years, you didn't--take away my job, too? Somebody ought to pin a Carnegie medal on you!" "You've held down a twenty-dollar-a-week job season in and season out, when there've been times it didn't even pay for the ink it took to write you on the pay-roll." "There's nothing I ever got out of you I didn't earn three times over."