II.
It was easy to arrange. Josephine phoned the aunt with whom she was to lunch, dropped the chauffeur, and not without a certain breathlessness approached Hoftzer’s Rathskeller Garten on North State Street. She wore a blue crêpe-de-chine dress sprinkled with soft grey leaves that were the color of her eyes.
John Boynton Bailey was waiting in front of the restaurant, looking distracted, yet protective, and Josephine’s uneasiness departed.
He said, “We don’t want to eat in this place. It seemed all right when I thought about it, but I just looked inside, and you might get sawdust in your shoes. We better go to some hotel.”
Agreeably she turned in the direction of a hotel sacred to tea-dancing, but he shook his head.
“You’d meet a lot of your friends. Let’s go to the old La Grange.”
T
