“You mustn’t tell me you don’t like Cotuits!” he exclaimed.

She touched one, delicately, with her fork.

“They’re alive!” she exclaimed, though the custom of consuming them thus was by no means unknown to her.  Lise had often boasted of a taste for oysters on the shell, though really preferring them smothered with red catsup in a “cocktail.”

“They’re alive, but they don’t know it.  They won’t eat you,” Ditmar replied gleefully.  “Squeeze a little lemon on one.”  Another sort of woman, he reflected, would have feigned a familiarity with the dish.

She obeyed him, put one in her mouth, gave a little shiver, and swallowed it quickly.

“Well?” he said.  “It isn’t bad, is it?”

“It seems so queer to eat anything alive, and enjoy it,” she said, as she ate the rest of them.

“If you think they’re good here you ought to taste them on the Cape, right out of the water,” he declared, and went on to relate how he had once eaten a fabulous number in a contest with a friend of his, and won a bet.  He was fond of talking about wagers he had won.  Betting had lent a zest to his life.  “We’ll roll down there together some day next summer, little girl.  It’s a great place.  You can go in swimming three times a day and never feel it.  And talk about eating oysters, you can’t swallow ’em as fast as a fellow I know down there, Joe Pusey, can open ’em.  It’s some trick to open ’em.”

He described the process, but she—­scarcely listened.  She was striving to adjust herself to the elements of a new and revolutionary experience; to the waiters who came and went, softly, deferentially putting hot plates before her, helping her to strange and delicious things; a creamy soup, a fish with a yellow sauce whose ingredients were artfully disguised, a breast of guinea fowl, a salad, an ice, and a small cup of coffee.  Instincts and tastes hitherto unsuspected and ungratified were aroused in her.  What would it be like always to be daintily served, to eat one’s meals in this leisurely and luxurious manner?  As her physical hunger was satisfied by the dainty food, even as her starved senses drank in the caressing warmth and harmony of the room, the gleaming fire, the heavy scent of the flowers, the rose glow of the lights in contrast to the storm without,—­so the storm flinging itself against the windows, powerless to reach her, seemed to typify a former existence of cold, black mornings and factory bells and harsh sirens, of toil and limitations.  Had her existence been like that? or was it a dream, a nightmare from which she had awakened at last?  From time to time, deep within her, she felt persisting a conviction that that was reality, this illusion, but she fought it down.  She wanted—­oh, how she wanted to believe in the illusion!