A few days ago, I was sitting in a Thai restaurant enjoying a meal when I got on a phone call from a friend I hadn't spoken to in a long time. In my enthusiasm and excitement, I talked quite louder than usual voice and in Spanish, my mother tongue. A few minutes into the call, an old lady sitting at the table beside mine got up, seemingly offended, and asked the restaurant staff to relocate   a table as far away as possible from this man who seemed to be impolite. I sank in my seat out of embarrassment. I ended the call soon afterwards and felt the urge to apologize. Before getting up, I looked around to see where she was and she was at the table farthest away from me. I noticed that the lady was alone and staring out the window. I found a tinge   of sadness or anxiety and perhaps a desire for aloneness and peace. But I had obviously destroyed it minutes earlier. Right then I abandoned my plan for a conventional apologetic gesture. Seeing those funny smile cards in my wallet, I took one out and wrote some words to express my apology. On signing my restaurant bill, I asked a waiter to secretly charge the lady's meal to me and hand her the smile card instead of her bill. Did she take it the wrong way, I wondered? Did she get confused? Did she refuse the anonymous   offer? And so on. I just waited and felt nervous to learn the outcome. To my pleasant surprise, things turned out the best possible way. The waiter approached me in a joy, telling me, "In the many times she had dined here before, I had never seen the old lady smile as she did when receiving the smile card and the $0 bill. She thanked me even though I explained that someone else did the job." The old lady changed her seat mainly because of   _  .
her private phone call the author's loud voice the views out of the window the restaurant staff's mistake