Have cold feet and eat onions?

Forums: English, Esl, Grammar, O Henry
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“Then listen.
I am the murderer of Marie Cusheau.
She was my wife and she had cold feet and ate onions.
What was I to do?
Yet life is sweet to me.
I do not wish to be guillotined.
I have heard that you are on my track.
Is it true that the case is in your hands?”
------O. Henry Tracked to Doom

http://www.literaturecollection.com/a/o_henry/130/

I think here "had cold feet" means be nervous/afraid or lose one's confidence, then what about "ate onions"? Does it simply mean the thing of eating onions? If it does, that is to say the murderer hates onions, and his wife's love of onions constitute one reason for his murduring. Is that right?

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I would suggest that "had cold feet" meant literally that her feet felt cold to him when they slept together at night. Eating onions might make her breath unpleasant to him. Essentially, he is making petty complaints about her which do not justify murder.

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Or just describing her in general set.

Being a unloving woman that was unpleasant to be near.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I would suggest that "had cold feet" meant literally that her feet felt cold to him when they slept together at night. Eating onions might make her breath unpleasant to him. Essentially, he is making petty complaints about her which do not justify murder.

All Murders are justified... One exception may be from Caligula... After executing a man who was presumed to have great wealth though he had none, Caligula said: He died for nothing... Well; most people killed die for nothing... It does not stop the act from being justified... Injustice is always justified, since what is just is accepted, and has no need of justification...

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@chai2,

chai2 wrote:

Or just describing her in general set.

Being a unloving woman that was unpleasant to be near.

I wonder if she had cold feet and ate onions when he married her... If it was not enough to annul the marriage, why should it be enough to murder... She was probably just right... Living with some one who knows what they are talking about, and tells you so is hard to take... I told you so makes lousy pillow talk..

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@chai2,

Yes, but it doesn't mean "having cold feet" in the sense of having second thoughts about an enterprise.

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@Justin Xu,

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Fido's reading too much into this. If you read it in context of O Henry's work, Set is correct about the alleged excuse for the murder.

"What else could I do but kill her?" was a line by Claude Raines in an old time slasher movie.Same thing here.

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@Justin Xu,

The writer is playing with words.

"She had cold feet and ate onions" means that her feet weren't warm and she had bad breath making her undesirable but the double entendre is that she had no desire in the marital bed notwithstanding a more literal interpretation of cold feet.

"Yet life is sweet to me" uses antithesis to contrast the onions with sweet and life with her murder despite wishing to avoid death himself at the guillotine.

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Have cold feet and eat onions?

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