This
interview could take place only on neutral ground, and she bethought
herself greatly before selecting a place of meeting. She had an
inclination for Greenwood Cemetery, but she gave it up as too
distant; she could not absent herself for so long, as she said,
without exciting suspicion. Then she thought of the Battery, but
that was rather cold and windy, besides one's being exposed to
intrusion from the Irish emigrants who at this point alight, with
large appetites, in the New World and at last she fixed upon an
oyster saloon in the Seventh Avenue, kept by a negro--an
establishment of which she knew nothing save that she had noticed it
in passing. She made an appointment with Morris Townsend to meet him
there, and she went to the tryst at dusk, enveloped in an
impenetrable veil. He kept her waiting for half an hour--he had
almost the whole width of the city to traverse--but she liked to
wait, it seemed to intensify the situation. She ordered a cup of
tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she
was suffering in a romantic cause. When Morris at last arrived, they
sat together for half an hour in the duskiest corner of a back shop;
and it is hardly too much to say that this was the happiest half-hour
that Mrs. Penniman had known for years. The situation was really
thrilling, and it scarcely seemed to her a false note when her
companion asked for an oyster stew, and proceeded to consume it
before her eyes.
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