 What is significant about the meal Matilda is served?
The best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was something of a paradox. This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and talk about it all to Matilda. Matilda, you see, had patience. She would read them carefully and then read them again, looking for the masculine names which, through a system known only to Matilda, had an affinity to her own. The first thing the widow Penshaws did was to take Matilda's left hand in her own and examine the next-to-the-last finger. Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!). Someone in Nebraska wanted to trade match books; someone in New York needed a midwestern pen pal, but it was a woman; an elderly man interested in ornithology wanted a young chick correspondent interested in the same subject; a young, personable man wanted an editorial position because he thought he had something to offer the editorial world; and— Matilda read the next one twice. The Literary Review was one of the few magazines which printed the name of the advertiser rather than a box number, and Matilda even liked the sound of the name. The moon shone in through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. Cedar Falls was a small town not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of writing a letter. Matilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom, dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger, and tiptoed downstairs. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray hair, suspicious eyes, and a broom-stick figure....
 It lends credence to Gorka’s otherworldly claims. How else could it have happened?
 It lends credence to Gorka’s otherworldly claims. How else could it have happened?  She’d been starving, and it was enough to distract her from the reality of what happened to her.  It’s exactly what she wanted to eat, and she didn’t have to ask for it. ,  It means Gorka’s paranoid servant had been observing her, and determined her favorite foods.