They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms. Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been well cooked. They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness by the church door, had made an appeal. She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy’s. Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother’s hands. Now that she sat before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother. After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm. “Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?” she said. “I am going to take you to the door of your room, that’s all.” “I’m glad,” she said; “it’s a long time since I’ve had an evening like this. It makes me feel clean.” For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.