the same.

I didn't look for any difficulty with anything there except the bed,
and that wasn't _her_ fault, so I assured her everything was just
fine, and let her show me how to operate the gas-burner that was set
in the wall for heat. Then we went out, and she very carefully locked
the door, and handed me the key.

"You better keep that door locked," she said, just a little sharply.
"You never know...."

I wanted to ask her _what_ you never know, but had the impression that
it was something _every_body was supposed to know, so I just nodded
and agreed instead.

"You want to get some lunch," she said then, "there's a place down the
road isn't too bad. Clean, anyhow, and they don't cater too much to
those ... well, it's clean." She pointed the way; you could see the
sign from where we were standing. I thanked her, and started the car,
and decided I might as well go there as anyplace else, especially
since I could see she was watching to find out whether I did or not.

* * * * *

These people are all too big. Or almost all of them. But the man
behind the counter at the diner was enormous. He was tall and fat with
a beefy red face and large open pores and a fleshy mound of a nose. I
didn't like to look at him, and when he talked, he boomed so loud I
could hardly understand him. On top of all that, the smell in that
place was awful: not quite as bad as the drugstore, but some ways
similar to it. I kept my eyes on the menu, which was full of
unfamiliar words, and tried to remember that I was hungry.

The man was shouting at me--or it was more like growling, I guess--and
I couldn't make out the words at first. He said it again, and I sorted
out syllables and matched them with the words on the card, and then I
got it:

"Goulash is nice today, miss...."

I didn't know what goulash was, and the state my stomach was in, with
the smells, I decided I'd better play safe, and ordered a glass of
milk, and some vegetable soup.

The milk had a strange taste to it. Not _bad_--just _different_. But
of course, this came from cows. That was all right. But the vegetable
soup...!

It was quite literally putrid, made as near as I could figure out from
dead animal juices, in which vegetables had been soaked and cooked
till any trace of flavor or nourishment was entirely removed. I took
one taste of that, and then I realized what the really nauseating part
of the odor was, in the diner and the drugs