CHAPTER IVCinderella

49CHAPTER IVCinderella

Nancy shut the door of her apartment behind her, and slipped out into the dimly lit corridor. From her sitting-room came a burst of concerted laughter, the sound of Betty’s sweet, high pitched voice raised in sudden protest, and then the echo of some sort of a physical struggle; and Caroline took the piano and began to improvise.“They won’t miss me,” Nancy said to herself, “I must have air.” She drew a long breath with a hand against her breast, apparently to relieve the pressure there. “I can’t stay shut up in aroom,” she kept repeating as if she were stating the most reasonable of premises, and turning, fled down the two flights of stairs that led to the outside door of the building.The breath of the night was refreshingly cool upon her hot cheeks, and she smiled into the darkness gratefully. Across the way a row of brownstone houses, implacably boarded up for the summer, presented dull and dimly defined50surfaces that reflected nothing, not even the lights of the street, or the shadow of a passing straggler. Nancy turned her face toward the avenue. The nostalgia that was her inheritance from her father, and through him from a long line of ancestors that followed the sea whither it might lead them, was upon her this night, although she did not understand it as such. She only thought vaguely of a strip of white beach with a whiter moon hung high above it, and the long silver line of the tide,—drawing out.“I wish I had a hat on,” she said. There was a night light in the chemist’s shop at the corner, and the panel of mirror obligingly placed for the convenience of the passing crowd, at the left of the big window, showed her reflection quite plainly. She was suddenly inspired to take the soft taffeta girdle from the waist of her dark blue muslin gown, and bind it turban-wise about her head. The effect was pleasingly modish and conventional, and she quickened her steps—satisfied. There was a tingle in the air that set her blood pleasantly in motion, and she established a rhythm of pace that made her feel almost as if she were walking to music. Insensibly her mind took up its responsibilities51again as the blood, stimulated from its temporary inactivity, began to course naturally through her veins.“There is plenty of beer and ginger ale in the ice-box,” she thought, “and I’ve done this before, so they won’t be unnaturally disturbed about me. Billy wanted to take Caroline home early, and Dick can go on up-town with Betty, without making her feel that she ought to leave him alone with me for a last tête-à-tête. It will hurt Dick’s feelings, but he understands really. He has a most blessed understandingness, Dick has.”She had the avenue almost entirely to herself, a silent gleaming thoroughfare with the gracious emptiness that a much lived in street sometimes acquires, of a Sunday at the end of an adventurous season. It was early July, the beginning of the actual summer season in New York. Nancy had never before been in town so late in the year, nor for that matter had Caroline or Betty, but Betty’s interest in the affairs of the Inn was keeping her at Nancy’s side, while Caroline had just accepted a secretarial position in one of the big Industrial Leagues recently organized by women for women, that52would keep her in town all summer. Billy and Dick, by virtue of their respective occupations, were never away from New York for longer than the customary two weeks’ vacation.“My soul smoothed itself out, a long cramped scroll,”—her conscience placated on the score of her deserted guests, Nancy was quoting Browning to herself, as she widened the distance between herself and them. “I wonder why I have this irresistible tendency to shake the people I love best in the world at intervals. I am such a really well-balanced and rational individual, I don’t understand it in myself. I thought the Inn was going to take all the nonsense out of me, but it hasn’t, it appears,” she sighed; “but then, I think it is going to take the nonsense out of a lot of people that are only erratic because they have never been properly fed. I guess I’ll go and have a look at the old place in its Sunday evening calm. Already it seems queer not to be there at nine o’clock in the evening, but I don’t really think there are people enough in New York now on Sundays to make it an object.”Nancy’s feet turned mechanically toward the arena of her most serious activities. Like most53of us who run away, she was following by instinct the logical periphery of her responsibilities.The big green latticed gate was closed against all intruders. Nancy had the key to its padlock in her hand-bag, but she had no intention of using it. The white and crimson sign flapped in the soft breeze companionably responsive to the modest announcement, “Marble Workshop, Reproductions and Antiques, Garden Furniture,” which so inadequately invited those whom it might concern to a view of the petrified vaudeville within. Through the interstices of the gate the courtyard looked littered and unalluring;—the wicker tables without their fine white covers; the chairs pushed back in a heterogeneous assemblage; the segregated columns of a garden peristyle gaunt against the dark, gleamed a more ghostly white than the weather-stained busts and figures less recently added to the collection. It seemed to Nancy incredible that the place would ever bloom again with lights and bouquets and eager patrons, with her group of pretty flower-like waitresses moving deftly among them. She stared at the spot with the cold eye of the creator whose54handiwork is out of the range of his vision, and the inspiration of it for the moment, gone.“I feel like Cinderella and her godmother rolled into one,” she thought disconsolately. “I waved my wand, and made so many things happen, and now that the clock has struck, again here I am outside in the cold and dark,”—the wind was taking on a keener edge, and she shivered slightly in her muslins—“with nothing but a pumpkin shell to show for it. Hitty says that getting what you want is apt to be unlikely business, and I’m inclined to think she’s right.”It seemed to her suddenly that the thing she had wanted,—a picturesque, cleverly executed restaurant where people could be fed according to the academic ideals of an untried young woman like herself was an unthinkable thing. The power of illusion failed for the moment. Just what was it that she had hoped to accomplish with this fling at executive altruism? What was she doing with a French cook in white uniform, a competent staff of professional dishwashers and waitresses and kitchen helpers? How had it come about that she owned so many mounds and heaps and pyramids55of silver and metal and linen? What was this Inn that she had conceived as a project so unimaginably fine? Who were these shadow people that came and went there? Who was she? Why with all her vitality and all her hungry yearning for life and adventure couldn’t she even believe in her own substantiality and focus? Wasn’t life even real enough for a creature such as she to grasp it,—if it wasn’t—She saw a figure that was familiar to her turn in from the avenue, a tall man in an Inverness with a wide black hat pulled down over his eyes. For the moment she could not remember who he was, but by the time he had stopped in front of the big gate, giving utterance to a well delivered expletive, she knew him perfectly, and stood waiting, motionless, for him to turn and speak to her. She was sure that he would have no recollection of her. He turned, but it was some seconds before he addressed her.“Doubt thou the stars are fire,” he said at last, with a shrug that admitted her to the companionship of his discomfiture. “Doubt thou the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but56never doubt that your favorite New York restaurant will be closed on a Sunday night.”“Oh!isit your favorite New York restaurant?” Nancy cried, her heart in her throat. “It’s mine, you know, my—my favorite.”“So I judged, or you wouldn’t be beating against the gate so disconsolately.” It was too dark to see his face clearly, but Nancy realized that he was looking down at her quizzically through the darkness.“Do you really like this restaurant?” she persisted.“In some ways I like it very much. The food is quite possible as you know, very American in character, but very good American, and it has the advantage of being served out-of-doors. I am a Frenchman by adoption, and I like the outdoor café. In fact, I am never happy eating inside.”“The surroundings are picturesque?” Nancy hazarded.The stranger laughed. “According to the American ideal,” he said, “they are—but I do admit that they show a rather extraordinary imagination. I’ve often thought that I should like to make the acquaintance of the woman,—of57course, it’s a woman—who conceived the notion of this mortuary tea-room.”“Why, of course, is it a woman?”“A man wouldn’t set up housekeeping in—inPère Lachaise.”“Why not, if he found a really domestic-looking corner?”“Hewouldn’tin the first place, it wouldn’t occur to him, that’s all, and if he did he couldn’t get away with it. The only real drawback to this hostelry is, as you know, that they don’t serve spirits of any kind. I’m accustomed to a glass or two of wine with my dinner, and my food sticks in my throat when I can’t have it, but I’ve found a way around that, now.”“Oh! have you?” said Nancy.“Don’t give me away, but there’s a man about the place here whose name is Michael, and he possesses that blend of Gallic facility with Celtic canniness that makes the Irish so wonderful as a race. I told my trouble to Michael,—with the result that I get a teapot full of Chianti with my dinner every night, and no questions asked.”“Oh! you do?” gasped Nancy.“You see Michael is serving the best interests58of his employer, who wants to keep her patrons, because if I couldn’t have it I wouldn’t be there. He couldn’t trouble the lady about it, naturally, because it is technically an offense against the law. Come, let’s go and find a quiet corner where we can continue our conversation comfortably. There’s a painfully respectable little hotel around the corner here that looks like the Café L’avenue when you first go in, but is a place where the most bourgeoise of one’s aunts might put up.”“I—I don’t know that I can go,” said Nancy.“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, you know. My name is Collier Pratt. I’m an artist. The more bourgeoise of my aunts would introduce me if she were here. She’s a New Englander like so many of your own charming relatives.”“How did you know that?” Nancy asked, as she followed him with a docility quite new to her, past the big green gate, and the row of nondescript shops between it and the corner of Broadway.“I wasbornin Boston,” Collier Pratt said a trifle absently. “I know a Massachusetts product when I see one. Ah! here we are.”59He led her triumphantly to a table in the far corner of the practically empty restaurant, waved away the civilities of a swarthy and somewhat badly coordinated waiter, and pulled out her chair for her himself.“Now, let me have a look at you,” he said; “why, you’ve nothing on but muslin, and you’re wearing your belt for a turban.”“A sop to the conventions,” Nancy said, blushing burningly. She was not quite able yet to get her bearings with this extraordinary man, who had assumed charge of her so cavalierly, but she was eager to find her poise in the situation. “I ran away, and I thought it would look better to have something like a hat on.”“Looks,” said Collier Pratt, “looks! That’s New England, always the looks of a thing, never the feel of it. Mind you I don’t mean thelookof a thing, that’s something different again.”“Yes, I know, the conventional slant as opposed to the artistic perspective.”“Good! It isn’t necessary to have my remarks followed intelligently, but it always adds piquancy to the situation when they are. Speaking of artistic perspective, you have a60very nice coloring. I like a ruddy chestnut hair with a skin as delicately white and pink as yours.” He spoke impersonally with the narrowing eye of the artist. “I can see you either in white,—not quite a cream white, but almost,—against a pearly kind of Quakerish background, or flaming out in the most crude, barbaric assemblage of colors. That’s the advantage of your type and the environment you connote—you can be the whole show, or the veriest little mouse that ever sought the protective coloring of the shadows.”“You aren’t exactly taking the quickest way of putting me at my ease,” Nancy said. “I’m very much embarrassed, you know. I’d stand being looked over for a few minutes longer if I could,—but I can’t. I’m not having one of my most equable evenings.”“I beg your pardon,” Collier Pratt said.For the first time since she had seen his face with the light upon it, he smiled, and the smile relieved the rather empiric quality of his habitual expression. Nancy noticed the straight line of the heavy brows scarcely interrupted by the indication of the beginning of the nose, and wondering to herself if it were not possible61for a person with that eyebrow formation to escape the venality of disposition that is popularly supposed to be its adjunct,—decided affirmatively.“I’m not used to talking to American girls very much. I forget how daintily they’re accustomed to being handled. I’m extremely anxious to put you at your ease,” he added quietly. “I appreciate the privilege of your company on what promised to be the dullest of dull evenings. I should appreciate still more,” he bowed, as he handed her a bill of fare of the journalistic proportions of the usual hotel menu, “if you would make a choice of refreshment, that we may dispense with the somewhat pathological presence of our young friend here,” he indicated the waiter afflicted with the jerking and titubation of a badly strung puppet. “I advise Rhine wine and seltzer. I offer you anything from green chartreuse to Scotch and soda. Personally I’m going to drink Perrier water.”“I’d rather have an ice-cream,” Nancy said, “than anything else in the world,—coffee ice-cream, and a glass of water.”“I wonder if you would, or if you only think it’s—safer. At any rate I’m going to put my62coat over your shoulders while you eat it. I never leave my rooms at this hour of the night without this cape. If I can find a place to sit out in I always do, and I’m naturally rather cold-blooded.”“I’m not,” said Nancy, but she meekly allowed him to drape her in the folds of the light cape, and found it grateful to her.“Bring the lady a big cup of coffee, and mind you have it hot,” Collier Pratt ordered peremptorily, as her ice-cream was served by the shaking waiter. “Coffee may be the worst thing in the world for you, nervously. I don’t know,—it isn’t for me, I rather thrive on it, but at any rate I’m going to save you from the combination of organdie and ice-cream on a night like this. What is your name?” he inquired abruptly.“Ann Martin.”“Not at my service?”“I don’t know, yet.”“Well, I don’t know,—but I hope and trust so. I like you. You’ve got something they don’t have—these American girls,—softness and strength, too. I imagine you’ve never been out of America.”63“I—I have.”“With two other girls and a chaperon, doing Europe, and staying at all the hotels doped up for tourist consumption.”Nancy was constrained to answer with a smile.“You don’t like America very much,” she said presently.“I like it for itself, but I loathe it—for myself. My way of living here is all wrong. I can’t get to bed in this confounded city. I can’t get enough to eat.”“Oh! can’t you?” Nancy cried.“In Paris, or any town where there is a café life one naturally gets fed. The technique of living is taken care of much better over there. Yourconciergeserves you a nourishing breakfast as a matter of course. When you’ve done your morning’s work you go to your favorite café—not with the one object in life—to cram aChâteaubrianddown your dry and resisting throat because he who labors must live,—but to see your friends, to read your daily journals, to write your letters, and do it incidentally in the open air while some diplomat of a waiter serves you with food that assuages the palate,64without insulting your mood. That’s what I like about the little restaurant in the court there. It’s out-of-doors, and you may stay there without feeling your table is in requisition for the next man. It’s a very polite little place.”“You didn’t expect to get in there to-night.”“I had hopes of it. I’ve not dined, you see.”“Not dined?” Nancy’s eyes widened in dismay.“There’s no use for me to dine unless I can eat my food tranquilly, in some accustomed corner. Getting nourished with me is a spiritual, as well as a physical matter. It is with all sensitive people. Don’t you think so?”“I suppose so. I—I hadn’t thought of it that way. Couldn’t you eat something now—an oyster stew, or something like that?”“Nothing in any way remotely connected with that. An oyster stew is to me the most barbarous of concoctions. I loathe hot milk,—an oyster is an adjunct to a fish sauce, or a preface to a good dinner.”“You ought to have something,” Nancy urged, “even ice-cream is more nourishing than mineral water, or coffee with cream in it.”65“I like coffee after dinner, not before.”“If you only eat when it’s convenient, or the mood takes you,” Nancy cried out in real distress, “how can you ever be sure that you have calories enough? The requirement of an average man at active labor is estimated at over three thousand calories. You must have something like a balanced ration in order to do your work.”“Must I?” Collier Pratt smiled his rare smile. “Well, at any rate, it is good to hear you say so.”She finished her ice-cream, and Collier Pratt drank his mineral water slowly, and smoked innumerable cigarettes of Virginia tobacco. The conversation which had proceeded so expeditiously to this point seemed for no apparent reason, suddenly to become gratuitous. Nancy had never before begun on the subject of the balanced ration without being respectfully allowed to go through to the end. She had not been allowed to feel snubbed, but she was a little bewildered that any conversation in which she was participating, could be so gracefully stopped before it was ended by her expressed desire.66Collier Pratt took his watch out of his pocket, and looked at it hastily.“By jove,” he said, “I had entirely forgotten. I have a child in my charge. I must be about looking after her.”“A child?” Nancy cried, astonished.“Yes, a little girl. She’s probably sitting up for me, poor baby. Can you get home alone, if I put you on a bus or a street-car?”“If you’ll call a taxi for me—” Nancy said.She noticed that the check was paid with change instead of a bill. In fact, her host seemed not to have a bill of any denomination in his pocket, but to be undisturbed by the fact. He parted from her casually.“Good-by, child,” he said with his head in the door after he had given the chauffeur her street number; “with the permission ofle bon Dieu, we shall see each other again. I feel that He is going to give it to us.”“Good-by,” Nancy said to his retreating shoulder.At her own front door was Dick’s big Rolls-Royce, and Dick sitting inside of it, with his feet comfortably up, feigning sleep.“You didn’t think I’d go home until I saw67you safe inside your own door, did you?” he demanded.“Where’s Betty?” Nancy asked mechanically.“I sent Williams home with her. Then he came back here, and left the car with me.”“You needn’t have waited,” Nancy said, “I’m sorry, Dick, I—I had to have air. I had to get out. I couldn’t stay inside a minute longer.”“You need never explain anything to me.”“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?”Dick looked at her carefully before he made his answer. Then he said firmly.“No, dear.”“I might have told you,” she said, “if you had wanted to know.” She felt her knees sagging with fatigue, and drooped against the door-frame.“Come and sit in the car, and talk to me for a minute,” he suggested. “Do you good, before you climb the stairs.”He opened the car door for her ingratiatingly, but she shook her head.“I’ve done unconventional things enough for one evening,” she said. “Unlock the door for me. Hitty’ll be waiting up to take care of me.”“What’s that queer thing you’re wearing?”68he asked her, as he held the door for her to pass through, “I never remember seeing you wear that before.”Nancy looked down wonderingly at the folds of the Inverness still swinging from her shoulders. She had been subconsciously aware of the grateful warmth in which she was encased ever since she snuggled comfortably into the depths of the taxi-cab into which Collier Pratt had tucked her.“No, I neverhaveworn it before,” she said, answering Dick’s question.

Nancy shut the door of her apartment behind her, and slipped out into the dimly lit corridor. From her sitting-room came a burst of concerted laughter, the sound of Betty’s sweet, high pitched voice raised in sudden protest, and then the echo of some sort of a physical struggle; and Caroline took the piano and began to improvise.

“They won’t miss me,” Nancy said to herself, “I must have air.” She drew a long breath with a hand against her breast, apparently to relieve the pressure there. “I can’t stay shut up in aroom,” she kept repeating as if she were stating the most reasonable of premises, and turning, fled down the two flights of stairs that led to the outside door of the building.

The breath of the night was refreshingly cool upon her hot cheeks, and she smiled into the darkness gratefully. Across the way a row of brownstone houses, implacably boarded up for the summer, presented dull and dimly defined50surfaces that reflected nothing, not even the lights of the street, or the shadow of a passing straggler. Nancy turned her face toward the avenue. The nostalgia that was her inheritance from her father, and through him from a long line of ancestors that followed the sea whither it might lead them, was upon her this night, although she did not understand it as such. She only thought vaguely of a strip of white beach with a whiter moon hung high above it, and the long silver line of the tide,—drawing out.

“I wish I had a hat on,” she said. There was a night light in the chemist’s shop at the corner, and the panel of mirror obligingly placed for the convenience of the passing crowd, at the left of the big window, showed her reflection quite plainly. She was suddenly inspired to take the soft taffeta girdle from the waist of her dark blue muslin gown, and bind it turban-wise about her head. The effect was pleasingly modish and conventional, and she quickened her steps—satisfied. There was a tingle in the air that set her blood pleasantly in motion, and she established a rhythm of pace that made her feel almost as if she were walking to music. Insensibly her mind took up its responsibilities51again as the blood, stimulated from its temporary inactivity, began to course naturally through her veins.

“There is plenty of beer and ginger ale in the ice-box,” she thought, “and I’ve done this before, so they won’t be unnaturally disturbed about me. Billy wanted to take Caroline home early, and Dick can go on up-town with Betty, without making her feel that she ought to leave him alone with me for a last tête-à-tête. It will hurt Dick’s feelings, but he understands really. He has a most blessed understandingness, Dick has.”

She had the avenue almost entirely to herself, a silent gleaming thoroughfare with the gracious emptiness that a much lived in street sometimes acquires, of a Sunday at the end of an adventurous season. It was early July, the beginning of the actual summer season in New York. Nancy had never before been in town so late in the year, nor for that matter had Caroline or Betty, but Betty’s interest in the affairs of the Inn was keeping her at Nancy’s side, while Caroline had just accepted a secretarial position in one of the big Industrial Leagues recently organized by women for women, that52would keep her in town all summer. Billy and Dick, by virtue of their respective occupations, were never away from New York for longer than the customary two weeks’ vacation.

“My soul smoothed itself out, a long cramped scroll,”—her conscience placated on the score of her deserted guests, Nancy was quoting Browning to herself, as she widened the distance between herself and them. “I wonder why I have this irresistible tendency to shake the people I love best in the world at intervals. I am such a really well-balanced and rational individual, I don’t understand it in myself. I thought the Inn was going to take all the nonsense out of me, but it hasn’t, it appears,” she sighed; “but then, I think it is going to take the nonsense out of a lot of people that are only erratic because they have never been properly fed. I guess I’ll go and have a look at the old place in its Sunday evening calm. Already it seems queer not to be there at nine o’clock in the evening, but I don’t really think there are people enough in New York now on Sundays to make it an object.”

Nancy’s feet turned mechanically toward the arena of her most serious activities. Like most53of us who run away, she was following by instinct the logical periphery of her responsibilities.

The big green latticed gate was closed against all intruders. Nancy had the key to its padlock in her hand-bag, but she had no intention of using it. The white and crimson sign flapped in the soft breeze companionably responsive to the modest announcement, “Marble Workshop, Reproductions and Antiques, Garden Furniture,” which so inadequately invited those whom it might concern to a view of the petrified vaudeville within. Through the interstices of the gate the courtyard looked littered and unalluring;—the wicker tables without their fine white covers; the chairs pushed back in a heterogeneous assemblage; the segregated columns of a garden peristyle gaunt against the dark, gleamed a more ghostly white than the weather-stained busts and figures less recently added to the collection. It seemed to Nancy incredible that the place would ever bloom again with lights and bouquets and eager patrons, with her group of pretty flower-like waitresses moving deftly among them. She stared at the spot with the cold eye of the creator whose54handiwork is out of the range of his vision, and the inspiration of it for the moment, gone.

“I feel like Cinderella and her godmother rolled into one,” she thought disconsolately. “I waved my wand, and made so many things happen, and now that the clock has struck, again here I am outside in the cold and dark,”—the wind was taking on a keener edge, and she shivered slightly in her muslins—“with nothing but a pumpkin shell to show for it. Hitty says that getting what you want is apt to be unlikely business, and I’m inclined to think she’s right.”

It seemed to her suddenly that the thing she had wanted,—a picturesque, cleverly executed restaurant where people could be fed according to the academic ideals of an untried young woman like herself was an unthinkable thing. The power of illusion failed for the moment. Just what was it that she had hoped to accomplish with this fling at executive altruism? What was she doing with a French cook in white uniform, a competent staff of professional dishwashers and waitresses and kitchen helpers? How had it come about that she owned so many mounds and heaps and pyramids55of silver and metal and linen? What was this Inn that she had conceived as a project so unimaginably fine? Who were these shadow people that came and went there? Who was she? Why with all her vitality and all her hungry yearning for life and adventure couldn’t she even believe in her own substantiality and focus? Wasn’t life even real enough for a creature such as she to grasp it,—if it wasn’t—

She saw a figure that was familiar to her turn in from the avenue, a tall man in an Inverness with a wide black hat pulled down over his eyes. For the moment she could not remember who he was, but by the time he had stopped in front of the big gate, giving utterance to a well delivered expletive, she knew him perfectly, and stood waiting, motionless, for him to turn and speak to her. She was sure that he would have no recollection of her. He turned, but it was some seconds before he addressed her.

“Doubt thou the stars are fire,” he said at last, with a shrug that admitted her to the companionship of his discomfiture. “Doubt thou the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but56never doubt that your favorite New York restaurant will be closed on a Sunday night.”

“Oh!isit your favorite New York restaurant?” Nancy cried, her heart in her throat. “It’s mine, you know, my—my favorite.”

“So I judged, or you wouldn’t be beating against the gate so disconsolately.” It was too dark to see his face clearly, but Nancy realized that he was looking down at her quizzically through the darkness.

“Do you really like this restaurant?” she persisted.

“In some ways I like it very much. The food is quite possible as you know, very American in character, but very good American, and it has the advantage of being served out-of-doors. I am a Frenchman by adoption, and I like the outdoor café. In fact, I am never happy eating inside.”

“The surroundings are picturesque?” Nancy hazarded.

The stranger laughed. “According to the American ideal,” he said, “they are—but I do admit that they show a rather extraordinary imagination. I’ve often thought that I should like to make the acquaintance of the woman,—of57course, it’s a woman—who conceived the notion of this mortuary tea-room.”

“Why, of course, is it a woman?”

“A man wouldn’t set up housekeeping in—inPère Lachaise.”

“Why not, if he found a really domestic-looking corner?”

“Hewouldn’tin the first place, it wouldn’t occur to him, that’s all, and if he did he couldn’t get away with it. The only real drawback to this hostelry is, as you know, that they don’t serve spirits of any kind. I’m accustomed to a glass or two of wine with my dinner, and my food sticks in my throat when I can’t have it, but I’ve found a way around that, now.”

“Oh! have you?” said Nancy.

“Don’t give me away, but there’s a man about the place here whose name is Michael, and he possesses that blend of Gallic facility with Celtic canniness that makes the Irish so wonderful as a race. I told my trouble to Michael,—with the result that I get a teapot full of Chianti with my dinner every night, and no questions asked.”

“Oh! you do?” gasped Nancy.

“You see Michael is serving the best interests58of his employer, who wants to keep her patrons, because if I couldn’t have it I wouldn’t be there. He couldn’t trouble the lady about it, naturally, because it is technically an offense against the law. Come, let’s go and find a quiet corner where we can continue our conversation comfortably. There’s a painfully respectable little hotel around the corner here that looks like the Café L’avenue when you first go in, but is a place where the most bourgeoise of one’s aunts might put up.”

“I—I don’t know that I can go,” said Nancy.

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, you know. My name is Collier Pratt. I’m an artist. The more bourgeoise of my aunts would introduce me if she were here. She’s a New Englander like so many of your own charming relatives.”

“How did you know that?” Nancy asked, as she followed him with a docility quite new to her, past the big green gate, and the row of nondescript shops between it and the corner of Broadway.

“I wasbornin Boston,” Collier Pratt said a trifle absently. “I know a Massachusetts product when I see one. Ah! here we are.”

59

He led her triumphantly to a table in the far corner of the practically empty restaurant, waved away the civilities of a swarthy and somewhat badly coordinated waiter, and pulled out her chair for her himself.

“Now, let me have a look at you,” he said; “why, you’ve nothing on but muslin, and you’re wearing your belt for a turban.”

“A sop to the conventions,” Nancy said, blushing burningly. She was not quite able yet to get her bearings with this extraordinary man, who had assumed charge of her so cavalierly, but she was eager to find her poise in the situation. “I ran away, and I thought it would look better to have something like a hat on.”

“Looks,” said Collier Pratt, “looks! That’s New England, always the looks of a thing, never the feel of it. Mind you I don’t mean thelookof a thing, that’s something different again.”

“Yes, I know, the conventional slant as opposed to the artistic perspective.”

“Good! It isn’t necessary to have my remarks followed intelligently, but it always adds piquancy to the situation when they are. Speaking of artistic perspective, you have a60very nice coloring. I like a ruddy chestnut hair with a skin as delicately white and pink as yours.” He spoke impersonally with the narrowing eye of the artist. “I can see you either in white,—not quite a cream white, but almost,—against a pearly kind of Quakerish background, or flaming out in the most crude, barbaric assemblage of colors. That’s the advantage of your type and the environment you connote—you can be the whole show, or the veriest little mouse that ever sought the protective coloring of the shadows.”

“You aren’t exactly taking the quickest way of putting me at my ease,” Nancy said. “I’m very much embarrassed, you know. I’d stand being looked over for a few minutes longer if I could,—but I can’t. I’m not having one of my most equable evenings.”

“I beg your pardon,” Collier Pratt said.

For the first time since she had seen his face with the light upon it, he smiled, and the smile relieved the rather empiric quality of his habitual expression. Nancy noticed the straight line of the heavy brows scarcely interrupted by the indication of the beginning of the nose, and wondering to herself if it were not possible61for a person with that eyebrow formation to escape the venality of disposition that is popularly supposed to be its adjunct,—decided affirmatively.

“I’m not used to talking to American girls very much. I forget how daintily they’re accustomed to being handled. I’m extremely anxious to put you at your ease,” he added quietly. “I appreciate the privilege of your company on what promised to be the dullest of dull evenings. I should appreciate still more,” he bowed, as he handed her a bill of fare of the journalistic proportions of the usual hotel menu, “if you would make a choice of refreshment, that we may dispense with the somewhat pathological presence of our young friend here,” he indicated the waiter afflicted with the jerking and titubation of a badly strung puppet. “I advise Rhine wine and seltzer. I offer you anything from green chartreuse to Scotch and soda. Personally I’m going to drink Perrier water.”

“I’d rather have an ice-cream,” Nancy said, “than anything else in the world,—coffee ice-cream, and a glass of water.”

“I wonder if you would, or if you only think it’s—safer. At any rate I’m going to put my62coat over your shoulders while you eat it. I never leave my rooms at this hour of the night without this cape. If I can find a place to sit out in I always do, and I’m naturally rather cold-blooded.”

“I’m not,” said Nancy, but she meekly allowed him to drape her in the folds of the light cape, and found it grateful to her.

“Bring the lady a big cup of coffee, and mind you have it hot,” Collier Pratt ordered peremptorily, as her ice-cream was served by the shaking waiter. “Coffee may be the worst thing in the world for you, nervously. I don’t know,—it isn’t for me, I rather thrive on it, but at any rate I’m going to save you from the combination of organdie and ice-cream on a night like this. What is your name?” he inquired abruptly.

“Ann Martin.”

“Not at my service?”

“I don’t know, yet.”

“Well, I don’t know,—but I hope and trust so. I like you. You’ve got something they don’t have—these American girls,—softness and strength, too. I imagine you’ve never been out of America.”

63

“I—I have.”

“With two other girls and a chaperon, doing Europe, and staying at all the hotels doped up for tourist consumption.”

Nancy was constrained to answer with a smile.

“You don’t like America very much,” she said presently.

“I like it for itself, but I loathe it—for myself. My way of living here is all wrong. I can’t get to bed in this confounded city. I can’t get enough to eat.”

“Oh! can’t you?” Nancy cried.

“In Paris, or any town where there is a café life one naturally gets fed. The technique of living is taken care of much better over there. Yourconciergeserves you a nourishing breakfast as a matter of course. When you’ve done your morning’s work you go to your favorite café—not with the one object in life—to cram aChâteaubrianddown your dry and resisting throat because he who labors must live,—but to see your friends, to read your daily journals, to write your letters, and do it incidentally in the open air while some diplomat of a waiter serves you with food that assuages the palate,64without insulting your mood. That’s what I like about the little restaurant in the court there. It’s out-of-doors, and you may stay there without feeling your table is in requisition for the next man. It’s a very polite little place.”

“You didn’t expect to get in there to-night.”

“I had hopes of it. I’ve not dined, you see.”

“Not dined?” Nancy’s eyes widened in dismay.

“There’s no use for me to dine unless I can eat my food tranquilly, in some accustomed corner. Getting nourished with me is a spiritual, as well as a physical matter. It is with all sensitive people. Don’t you think so?”

“I suppose so. I—I hadn’t thought of it that way. Couldn’t you eat something now—an oyster stew, or something like that?”

“Nothing in any way remotely connected with that. An oyster stew is to me the most barbarous of concoctions. I loathe hot milk,—an oyster is an adjunct to a fish sauce, or a preface to a good dinner.”

“You ought to have something,” Nancy urged, “even ice-cream is more nourishing than mineral water, or coffee with cream in it.”

65

“I like coffee after dinner, not before.”

“If you only eat when it’s convenient, or the mood takes you,” Nancy cried out in real distress, “how can you ever be sure that you have calories enough? The requirement of an average man at active labor is estimated at over three thousand calories. You must have something like a balanced ration in order to do your work.”

“Must I?” Collier Pratt smiled his rare smile. “Well, at any rate, it is good to hear you say so.”

She finished her ice-cream, and Collier Pratt drank his mineral water slowly, and smoked innumerable cigarettes of Virginia tobacco. The conversation which had proceeded so expeditiously to this point seemed for no apparent reason, suddenly to become gratuitous. Nancy had never before begun on the subject of the balanced ration without being respectfully allowed to go through to the end. She had not been allowed to feel snubbed, but she was a little bewildered that any conversation in which she was participating, could be so gracefully stopped before it was ended by her expressed desire.

66

Collier Pratt took his watch out of his pocket, and looked at it hastily.

“By jove,” he said, “I had entirely forgotten. I have a child in my charge. I must be about looking after her.”

“A child?” Nancy cried, astonished.

“Yes, a little girl. She’s probably sitting up for me, poor baby. Can you get home alone, if I put you on a bus or a street-car?”

“If you’ll call a taxi for me—” Nancy said.

She noticed that the check was paid with change instead of a bill. In fact, her host seemed not to have a bill of any denomination in his pocket, but to be undisturbed by the fact. He parted from her casually.

“Good-by, child,” he said with his head in the door after he had given the chauffeur her street number; “with the permission ofle bon Dieu, we shall see each other again. I feel that He is going to give it to us.”

“Good-by,” Nancy said to his retreating shoulder.

At her own front door was Dick’s big Rolls-Royce, and Dick sitting inside of it, with his feet comfortably up, feigning sleep.

“You didn’t think I’d go home until I saw67you safe inside your own door, did you?” he demanded.

“Where’s Betty?” Nancy asked mechanically.

“I sent Williams home with her. Then he came back here, and left the car with me.”

“You needn’t have waited,” Nancy said, “I’m sorry, Dick, I—I had to have air. I had to get out. I couldn’t stay inside a minute longer.”

“You need never explain anything to me.”

“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?”

Dick looked at her carefully before he made his answer. Then he said firmly.

“No, dear.”

“I might have told you,” she said, “if you had wanted to know.” She felt her knees sagging with fatigue, and drooped against the door-frame.

“Come and sit in the car, and talk to me for a minute,” he suggested. “Do you good, before you climb the stairs.”

He opened the car door for her ingratiatingly, but she shook her head.

“I’ve done unconventional things enough for one evening,” she said. “Unlock the door for me. Hitty’ll be waiting up to take care of me.”

“What’s that queer thing you’re wearing?”68he asked her, as he held the door for her to pass through, “I never remember seeing you wear that before.”

Nancy looked down wonderingly at the folds of the Inverness still swinging from her shoulders. She had been subconsciously aware of the grateful warmth in which she was encased ever since she snuggled comfortably into the depths of the taxi-cab into which Collier Pratt had tucked her.

“No, I neverhaveworn it before,” she said, answering Dick’s question.

69CHAPTER VScience

The activities of the day at Outside Inn began with luncheon and the preparation for it. Nancy longed to serve breakfast there, but as yet it had not seemed practicable to do so. Most of the patrons of the restaurant conducted the business of the day down-town, but had their actual living quarters in New York’s remoter fastnesses,—Brooklyn, the Bronx or Harlem. Nancy was satisfied that the bulk of her patronage should be the commuting and cliff dwelling contingent of Manhattanites,—indeed it was the sort of patronage that from the beginning she had intended to cater to.Nancy did most of the marketing herself at first, but Gaspard—the big cook—gradually coaxed this privilege away from her.“You see,” he said, “we sit—us together, and talk of eating”—he prided himself on his use of English, and never used his native tongue to help him out, except in moments of great excitement. “It is immediately after breakfast.70Yes! I am full of milk-coffee sopped with bread, and you of bacon with eggs and marmalade. We say, what shall we give to our custom for its dinner and its luncheon? We think sadly—we who have but now brushed away the crumbs of breakfast—of those who must sit down so soon to the table groaning with viands. Therefore we say, ‘Market delicately. Have the soup clear, the entrée light and the salad green with plenty of vinegar.’ Even your calories—they do not help us much. They are in quantities so unexpected in the food that weighs nothing in the scales. We say you shall go to market and buy these things, and you go. I stir and walk about, and grow restless for mydéjeuner, and when you return from market, hungry too, we are not the same people who had thought our soup should be clear, and our entrée more beautiful than nutritious. If I go to market myselflateI am inspired there to buy what is right, because by that hour I have a proper relish and understanding of what all the world should eat.”“I know he is right,” Nancy said to Billy afterward in reporting the conversation, “I hate to admit it, but even my notion of what71other people should eat is colored by my own relation to food. I never realized before how little use an intellect is in this matter of food values. I can actually get up a meal that according to the tables is scientifically correct that wouldn’t feed anybody if they were hungry.”“One banana is equal to a pound and three-quarters of steak,” Billy misquoted helpfully.“The trouble is that itisn’t,” Nancy said, “except technically.”“You can’t eat it and grow thin.”“You can’t eat it and growfatunless it happens to be the peculiar food to which you are idiosyncratic.”“If that’s really a word,” Billy said, “I’ll overlook your trying it out on me. If it isn’t you’ll have to take the consequences.” He went through the pantomime of one preparing to do physical violence.“Oh! it’s a word. Ask Caroline.” Nancy’s eyes still held their look of being focussed on something in the remote distance. “The trouble with all this dietetic problem is that the individual is dependent on something more than an adjustment of values. His environment and72his heredity play an active part in his diet problem. Some people can eat highly concentrated food, others have to have bulk, and so on. You can’t substitute cheese and bananas for steak and do the race a service no matter what the cost of steak may soar to. You can’t even substitute rice for potatoes.”“Not unless your patronage is more Oriental than Celtic.”“Healthy people have to have honest fare of about the type to which their environment has accustomed them, but intelligently supervised,—that’s the conclusion I’ve come to.”“You may be right,” Billy said, “my general notion has always been that everybody ate wrong, and that everybody who would stand for it ought to be started all over again. I wouldn’t stand for it, so I’ve never looked into the matter.”“People don’t eat wrong, that’s the really startling discovery I’ve made recently. I mean healthy people don’t.”“I don’t believe it,” said Billy; “the way people eat is one of the most outrageous of the human scandals. I read the newspapers.”“The newspapers don’t know,” Nancy said;73“the individual usually has an instinctive working knowledge of the diet that is good for him, and his digestional experiences have taught him how to regulate it to some extent.”“How do you account for the clerk that orders coffee and sinkers at Child’s every day?”“That’s exactly it,” Nancy said. “He knows that he needs bulk and stimulation. He’s handicapped by his poverty, but he gets the nearest substitute for the diet that suits him that he can get. If he could afford it he would have a square meal that would nourish him as well as warm and fill him.”“I don’t see but what this interesting theory lets you out altogether. Why Outside Inn, with its foxy table d’hôte, if what’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and natural selection is the order of the day?”“Outside Inn is all the more necessary to the welfare of a nation that’s being starved out by the high cost of living. All I need to do is to have a little more variety, to have all the nutritive requirements in each meal, and such generous servings that every patron can make out a meal satisfying to himself.”“Everybody knows that all fat people eat all74the sweets that they can get, and all thin people take tea without sugar with lemon in it.”“These people aren’t healthy. That’s where the intelligent supervision comes in.”“What do you intend to do about them?”“Watch over them a little more carefully. Regulate their servings craftily. Be sure of my tables. I have lots of schemes. I’ll tell you about them sometime.”“Sometime,—for this relief much thanks,” murmured Billy; “just now I’ve had as much of these matters as I can stand. I don’t see how you are going to run this thing on a profit, though.”“I’m not,” Nancy said, “I’m losing money every minute. That fifteen thousand dollars is almost gone now, of course. Billy, do you think it would be perfectly awful if I didn’t try to make money at all?”“I think it would be a good deal wiser. I’ll raise all the money you want on your expectations.”“All right then. I’m not going to worry.”Billy looked down into the courtyard from the room up-stairs in which they had been talking. Already the preparations for lunch were75under way. The girls were moving deftly about, laying cloths and arranging flower vases and silver.“Can I get right down there and sit down at one of those tables and have my lunch,” Billy inquired, “or do I have to go out of the back door and come in the front like a regular customer?”“Whichever you prefer. There’s Caroline coming in at the gate now.”“Well, then, I know which I prefer,” Billy said, swimming realistically toward the stairs.“You are getting fat, Billy,” Caroline informed him critically after the amenities were over, and the meal appropriately begun. “You ought to watch your diet a little more carefully.”“No,” Billy said firmly, “I don’t need to watch my diet, I’m perfectly healthy, and therefore my natural cravings will point the way to my most judicious nourishment. Nancy has explained all to me.”“That’s a very interesting theory of Nancy’s,” Caroline said, “but I don’t altogether agree with it.”“I do,” said Billy, then he added hastily, “but76I agree with you, too, Caroline. You are to all other women what moonlight is to sunlight, or I mean—what sunlight is to moonlight. In other words—you are the goods.”“Don’t be silly, Billy.”“There’s only one thing in all this wide universe that you can’t say to me, Caroline, and ‘don’t be silly, Billy,’ is that thing,—express this same thing invers libreif you must say it! Look at the handsome soup you’re getting. What is the name of that soup, Molly?”He smiled ingratiatingly at the little waitress, who always beamed at any one of Nancy’s particular friends that came into the restaurant, and made a point of serving them if she could possibly arrange it.“Cream of spinach,” she said, “it’s a special to-day.”“Beautiful soup so rich and green,” Billy began in a soulful baritone, “waiting in a hot tureen. Where’s mine, Molly?”“Dolly’s bringing your first course, sir.”Billy gazed in perplexity at the half of a delicious grapefruit set before him by the duplicate of the pretty girl who stood smiling deprecatingly behind Caroline’s chair.77“Where’s my soup, Dolly?” Billy asked with a thundering sternness of manner.“I’m sorry, sir,” Dolly began glibly, “but the soup has given out. Will you be good enough to allow the substitution of—”“That’s a formula,” Billy said. “The soup can’t be out. We’re the first people in the dining-room. Go tell Miss Nancy that I will be served with some of that green soup at once, or know the reason why.”The two waitresses exchanged glances, and went off together suppressing giggles, to return almost immediately, their risibility still causing them great physical inconvenience.“Intelligent supervision, she says.” Dolly exploded into the miniature patch of muslin and ribbon that served her as an apron.“She says that’s the reason why,” Molly contributed,—following her sister’s example.“Nancy doesn’t serve soup to a fat man if she can possibly avoid it. That’s part of her theory,” Caroline explained. “There’s no use making a fuss about it, because you won’t get it.”Billy sat looking at his grapefruit for some seconds in silence. Then he began on it slowly.“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.78Nancy was learning a great many things very rapidly. The practical application of her theories of feeding mankind to her actual experiments with the shifting population of New York, revolutionized her attitude toward the problem almost daily. She had started in with a great many ideas and ideals of service, with preconceived notions of balanced rations, and exact distribution of fuel stuffs to the human unit. She had come to realize very shortly, that the human unit was a quantity as incalculable in its relation to its digestive problems as its psychological ones. She had believed vaguely that in reference to food values the race made its great exception to its rule of working out toward normality; but she changed that opinion very quickly as she watched her fellow men selecting their diet with as sure an instinct for their nutritive requirements as if she had coached them personally for years.From the assumption that she lived in a world gone dietetically mad, and hence in the process of destroying itself, she had gradually come to see that in this phase of his struggle for existence, as well as in every other, the instinct of man operated automatically in the direction79of his salvation. This new attitude in tie matter relieved her of much of her responsibility, but left her not less anxious to do what she could for her kind in the matter of calories. She was, as she had shown in her treatment of Billy, not entirely blinded by her growing predilection in favor of the doctrine of natural selection.Every day she had Gaspard make, in addition to his regular table d’hôte menu, dozens of nutritive custards, quarts of stimulating broths and jellies and other dishes containing the maximum of easily digested and highly concentrated nutriment, and these she managed to have Molly or Dolly or even Hildeguard—the Alma Tadema girl—introduce into the luncheon or dinner service in the case of those patrons who seemed to need peculiarly careful nourishing. Let a white-faced girl sink into a seat within the range of Nancy’s vision,—she always ensconced herself in the doorway screened with vines at the beginning of a meal,—and she gave orders at once for the crafty substitution of invalid broth for soup, of rich nut bread for the ordinary rolls and crackers, of custards or specially made ice-cream for the dessert of the80day. No overfed, pasty-faced man ever escaped from Outside Inn until an attempt at least had been made to introduce a portion of stewed prunes into his diet; and all such were fed the minimum of bread and other starchy foods, and the maximum of salad and green vegetables. Nancy had gluten bread made in quantities for the stouter element of her patronage, and in nine cases out of ten she was able to get it served and eaten without protest. Some of her regular patrons began to change weight gradually, a heavy man or two became less heavy, and a wraithlike girl now and then took on a new bloom and substantiality. These were the triumphs for which Nancy lived. Her only regret was that she was not able to give to each her personal time and attention, and establish herself on a footing with her patrons where she might learn from their own lips the secrets of their metabolism.She was not known as the proprietor of the place. In fact, the management of the restaurant was kept a careful secret from those who frequented it and with the habitual indifference of New Yorkers to the power behind the throne, so long as its affairs were manipulated in good81and regular order, they soon ceased to feel any apparent curiosity about it. Betty, who sometimes rebelled at remaining so scrupulously incognita, defiantly took the limelight at intervals and moved among the assembled guests with an authoritative and possessive air, adjusting and rearranging small details, and acknowledging the presence ofhabitués, but since her attentions were popularly supposed to be those of a superior head waitress, she soon tired of the gesture of offering them.Nancy’s intention had been to allow the restaurant to speak for itself, and then at the climactic moment to allow her connection with it to be discovered, and to speak for it with all the force and earnestness of which she was capable. She had meant to stand sponsor for the practical working theory on which her experiment was based, and she had already partially formulated interviews with herself in which she modestly acknowledged the success of that experiment, but the untoward direction in which it was developing made such a revelation inexpedient.There was one regular patron to whom she was peculiarly anxious to remain incognita.82Collier Pratt made it his almost invariable habit to come sauntering toward the table in the corner, under the life-sized effigy of theVênus de Medici, at seven o’clock in the evening, and that table was scrupulously reserved for him. To it were sent the choicest of all the viands that Outside Inn could command. Michael was tacitly sped on his way with his teapot full of claret. Gaspard did amazing things with the breasts of ducks and segments of orange, with squab chicken stuffed with new corn, withfilets de sole a la Marguery. Nancy craftily spurred him on to his most ambitious achievements under pretense of wishing her own appetite stimulated, and the big cook, who adored her, produced triumph after triumph of his art for her delectation, whereupon the biggest part of it was cunningly smuggled out to the artist. From behind her screen of vines Nancy watched the fine features of her quondam friend light with the rapture of thegourmetas be sampled Gaspard’s sauceverteor Hollandaise or lifted the glass cover from the mushroomssous clocheand inhaled their delicate aroma.“I wonder if he finds our food very American83in character, now,” she said to herself, with a blush at the memory of the real southern cornbread and candied sweet potatoes that were offered him in the initial weeks of his patronage. Gaspard still made these delicacies for luncheon, but they had been almost entirely banished from the dinner menu. Afternoon tea at the Inn was famous for the wonderful waffles produced with Parisian precision from a traditional Virginian recipe, but Collier Pratt never appeared at either of these meals to criticize them for being American.

The activities of the day at Outside Inn began with luncheon and the preparation for it. Nancy longed to serve breakfast there, but as yet it had not seemed practicable to do so. Most of the patrons of the restaurant conducted the business of the day down-town, but had their actual living quarters in New York’s remoter fastnesses,—Brooklyn, the Bronx or Harlem. Nancy was satisfied that the bulk of her patronage should be the commuting and cliff dwelling contingent of Manhattanites,—indeed it was the sort of patronage that from the beginning she had intended to cater to.

Nancy did most of the marketing herself at first, but Gaspard—the big cook—gradually coaxed this privilege away from her.

“You see,” he said, “we sit—us together, and talk of eating”—he prided himself on his use of English, and never used his native tongue to help him out, except in moments of great excitement. “It is immediately after breakfast.70Yes! I am full of milk-coffee sopped with bread, and you of bacon with eggs and marmalade. We say, what shall we give to our custom for its dinner and its luncheon? We think sadly—we who have but now brushed away the crumbs of breakfast—of those who must sit down so soon to the table groaning with viands. Therefore we say, ‘Market delicately. Have the soup clear, the entrée light and the salad green with plenty of vinegar.’ Even your calories—they do not help us much. They are in quantities so unexpected in the food that weighs nothing in the scales. We say you shall go to market and buy these things, and you go. I stir and walk about, and grow restless for mydéjeuner, and when you return from market, hungry too, we are not the same people who had thought our soup should be clear, and our entrée more beautiful than nutritious. If I go to market myselflateI am inspired there to buy what is right, because by that hour I have a proper relish and understanding of what all the world should eat.”

“I know he is right,” Nancy said to Billy afterward in reporting the conversation, “I hate to admit it, but even my notion of what71other people should eat is colored by my own relation to food. I never realized before how little use an intellect is in this matter of food values. I can actually get up a meal that according to the tables is scientifically correct that wouldn’t feed anybody if they were hungry.”

“One banana is equal to a pound and three-quarters of steak,” Billy misquoted helpfully.

“The trouble is that itisn’t,” Nancy said, “except technically.”

“You can’t eat it and grow thin.”

“You can’t eat it and growfatunless it happens to be the peculiar food to which you are idiosyncratic.”

“If that’s really a word,” Billy said, “I’ll overlook your trying it out on me. If it isn’t you’ll have to take the consequences.” He went through the pantomime of one preparing to do physical violence.

“Oh! it’s a word. Ask Caroline.” Nancy’s eyes still held their look of being focussed on something in the remote distance. “The trouble with all this dietetic problem is that the individual is dependent on something more than an adjustment of values. His environment and72his heredity play an active part in his diet problem. Some people can eat highly concentrated food, others have to have bulk, and so on. You can’t substitute cheese and bananas for steak and do the race a service no matter what the cost of steak may soar to. You can’t even substitute rice for potatoes.”

“Not unless your patronage is more Oriental than Celtic.”

“Healthy people have to have honest fare of about the type to which their environment has accustomed them, but intelligently supervised,—that’s the conclusion I’ve come to.”

“You may be right,” Billy said, “my general notion has always been that everybody ate wrong, and that everybody who would stand for it ought to be started all over again. I wouldn’t stand for it, so I’ve never looked into the matter.”

“People don’t eat wrong, that’s the really startling discovery I’ve made recently. I mean healthy people don’t.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Billy; “the way people eat is one of the most outrageous of the human scandals. I read the newspapers.”

“The newspapers don’t know,” Nancy said;73“the individual usually has an instinctive working knowledge of the diet that is good for him, and his digestional experiences have taught him how to regulate it to some extent.”

“How do you account for the clerk that orders coffee and sinkers at Child’s every day?”

“That’s exactly it,” Nancy said. “He knows that he needs bulk and stimulation. He’s handicapped by his poverty, but he gets the nearest substitute for the diet that suits him that he can get. If he could afford it he would have a square meal that would nourish him as well as warm and fill him.”

“I don’t see but what this interesting theory lets you out altogether. Why Outside Inn, with its foxy table d’hôte, if what’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and natural selection is the order of the day?”

“Outside Inn is all the more necessary to the welfare of a nation that’s being starved out by the high cost of living. All I need to do is to have a little more variety, to have all the nutritive requirements in each meal, and such generous servings that every patron can make out a meal satisfying to himself.”

“Everybody knows that all fat people eat all74the sweets that they can get, and all thin people take tea without sugar with lemon in it.”

“These people aren’t healthy. That’s where the intelligent supervision comes in.”

“What do you intend to do about them?”

“Watch over them a little more carefully. Regulate their servings craftily. Be sure of my tables. I have lots of schemes. I’ll tell you about them sometime.”

“Sometime,—for this relief much thanks,” murmured Billy; “just now I’ve had as much of these matters as I can stand. I don’t see how you are going to run this thing on a profit, though.”

“I’m not,” Nancy said, “I’m losing money every minute. That fifteen thousand dollars is almost gone now, of course. Billy, do you think it would be perfectly awful if I didn’t try to make money at all?”

“I think it would be a good deal wiser. I’ll raise all the money you want on your expectations.”

“All right then. I’m not going to worry.”

Billy looked down into the courtyard from the room up-stairs in which they had been talking. Already the preparations for lunch were75under way. The girls were moving deftly about, laying cloths and arranging flower vases and silver.

“Can I get right down there and sit down at one of those tables and have my lunch,” Billy inquired, “or do I have to go out of the back door and come in the front like a regular customer?”

“Whichever you prefer. There’s Caroline coming in at the gate now.”

“Well, then, I know which I prefer,” Billy said, swimming realistically toward the stairs.

“You are getting fat, Billy,” Caroline informed him critically after the amenities were over, and the meal appropriately begun. “You ought to watch your diet a little more carefully.”

“No,” Billy said firmly, “I don’t need to watch my diet, I’m perfectly healthy, and therefore my natural cravings will point the way to my most judicious nourishment. Nancy has explained all to me.”

“That’s a very interesting theory of Nancy’s,” Caroline said, “but I don’t altogether agree with it.”

“I do,” said Billy, then he added hastily, “but76I agree with you, too, Caroline. You are to all other women what moonlight is to sunlight, or I mean—what sunlight is to moonlight. In other words—you are the goods.”

“Don’t be silly, Billy.”

“There’s only one thing in all this wide universe that you can’t say to me, Caroline, and ‘don’t be silly, Billy,’ is that thing,—express this same thing invers libreif you must say it! Look at the handsome soup you’re getting. What is the name of that soup, Molly?”

He smiled ingratiatingly at the little waitress, who always beamed at any one of Nancy’s particular friends that came into the restaurant, and made a point of serving them if she could possibly arrange it.

“Cream of spinach,” she said, “it’s a special to-day.”

“Beautiful soup so rich and green,” Billy began in a soulful baritone, “waiting in a hot tureen. Where’s mine, Molly?”

“Dolly’s bringing your first course, sir.”

Billy gazed in perplexity at the half of a delicious grapefruit set before him by the duplicate of the pretty girl who stood smiling deprecatingly behind Caroline’s chair.

77

“Where’s my soup, Dolly?” Billy asked with a thundering sternness of manner.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Dolly began glibly, “but the soup has given out. Will you be good enough to allow the substitution of—”

“That’s a formula,” Billy said. “The soup can’t be out. We’re the first people in the dining-room. Go tell Miss Nancy that I will be served with some of that green soup at once, or know the reason why.”

The two waitresses exchanged glances, and went off together suppressing giggles, to return almost immediately, their risibility still causing them great physical inconvenience.

“Intelligent supervision, she says.” Dolly exploded into the miniature patch of muslin and ribbon that served her as an apron.

“She says that’s the reason why,” Molly contributed,—following her sister’s example.

“Nancy doesn’t serve soup to a fat man if she can possibly avoid it. That’s part of her theory,” Caroline explained. “There’s no use making a fuss about it, because you won’t get it.”

Billy sat looking at his grapefruit for some seconds in silence. Then he began on it slowly.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

78

Nancy was learning a great many things very rapidly. The practical application of her theories of feeding mankind to her actual experiments with the shifting population of New York, revolutionized her attitude toward the problem almost daily. She had started in with a great many ideas and ideals of service, with preconceived notions of balanced rations, and exact distribution of fuel stuffs to the human unit. She had come to realize very shortly, that the human unit was a quantity as incalculable in its relation to its digestive problems as its psychological ones. She had believed vaguely that in reference to food values the race made its great exception to its rule of working out toward normality; but she changed that opinion very quickly as she watched her fellow men selecting their diet with as sure an instinct for their nutritive requirements as if she had coached them personally for years.

From the assumption that she lived in a world gone dietetically mad, and hence in the process of destroying itself, she had gradually come to see that in this phase of his struggle for existence, as well as in every other, the instinct of man operated automatically in the direction79of his salvation. This new attitude in tie matter relieved her of much of her responsibility, but left her not less anxious to do what she could for her kind in the matter of calories. She was, as she had shown in her treatment of Billy, not entirely blinded by her growing predilection in favor of the doctrine of natural selection.

Every day she had Gaspard make, in addition to his regular table d’hôte menu, dozens of nutritive custards, quarts of stimulating broths and jellies and other dishes containing the maximum of easily digested and highly concentrated nutriment, and these she managed to have Molly or Dolly or even Hildeguard—the Alma Tadema girl—introduce into the luncheon or dinner service in the case of those patrons who seemed to need peculiarly careful nourishing. Let a white-faced girl sink into a seat within the range of Nancy’s vision,—she always ensconced herself in the doorway screened with vines at the beginning of a meal,—and she gave orders at once for the crafty substitution of invalid broth for soup, of rich nut bread for the ordinary rolls and crackers, of custards or specially made ice-cream for the dessert of the80day. No overfed, pasty-faced man ever escaped from Outside Inn until an attempt at least had been made to introduce a portion of stewed prunes into his diet; and all such were fed the minimum of bread and other starchy foods, and the maximum of salad and green vegetables. Nancy had gluten bread made in quantities for the stouter element of her patronage, and in nine cases out of ten she was able to get it served and eaten without protest. Some of her regular patrons began to change weight gradually, a heavy man or two became less heavy, and a wraithlike girl now and then took on a new bloom and substantiality. These were the triumphs for which Nancy lived. Her only regret was that she was not able to give to each her personal time and attention, and establish herself on a footing with her patrons where she might learn from their own lips the secrets of their metabolism.

She was not known as the proprietor of the place. In fact, the management of the restaurant was kept a careful secret from those who frequented it and with the habitual indifference of New Yorkers to the power behind the throne, so long as its affairs were manipulated in good81and regular order, they soon ceased to feel any apparent curiosity about it. Betty, who sometimes rebelled at remaining so scrupulously incognita, defiantly took the limelight at intervals and moved among the assembled guests with an authoritative and possessive air, adjusting and rearranging small details, and acknowledging the presence ofhabitués, but since her attentions were popularly supposed to be those of a superior head waitress, she soon tired of the gesture of offering them.

Nancy’s intention had been to allow the restaurant to speak for itself, and then at the climactic moment to allow her connection with it to be discovered, and to speak for it with all the force and earnestness of which she was capable. She had meant to stand sponsor for the practical working theory on which her experiment was based, and she had already partially formulated interviews with herself in which she modestly acknowledged the success of that experiment, but the untoward direction in which it was developing made such a revelation inexpedient.

There was one regular patron to whom she was peculiarly anxious to remain incognita.82Collier Pratt made it his almost invariable habit to come sauntering toward the table in the corner, under the life-sized effigy of theVênus de Medici, at seven o’clock in the evening, and that table was scrupulously reserved for him. To it were sent the choicest of all the viands that Outside Inn could command. Michael was tacitly sped on his way with his teapot full of claret. Gaspard did amazing things with the breasts of ducks and segments of orange, with squab chicken stuffed with new corn, withfilets de sole a la Marguery. Nancy craftily spurred him on to his most ambitious achievements under pretense of wishing her own appetite stimulated, and the big cook, who adored her, produced triumph after triumph of his art for her delectation, whereupon the biggest part of it was cunningly smuggled out to the artist. From behind her screen of vines Nancy watched the fine features of her quondam friend light with the rapture of thegourmetas be sampled Gaspard’s sauceverteor Hollandaise or lifted the glass cover from the mushroomssous clocheand inhaled their delicate aroma.

“I wonder if he finds our food very American83in character, now,” she said to herself, with a blush at the memory of the real southern cornbread and candied sweet potatoes that were offered him in the initial weeks of his patronage. Gaspard still made these delicacies for luncheon, but they had been almost entirely banished from the dinner menu. Afternoon tea at the Inn was famous for the wonderful waffles produced with Parisian precision from a traditional Virginian recipe, but Collier Pratt never appeared at either of these meals to criticize them for being American.

84CHAPTER VIAn Eleemosynary Institution

One night during the latter part of July Betty had a birthday, and according to immemorial custom Caroline and Nancy and Dick and Billy helped her to celebrate it at one of the old-fashioned down-town hotels where they had ordered practically the same dinner for her anniversaries ever since they had been grown up enough to celebrate them unchaperoned. Caroline’s brother, Preston, had made a sixth member of the party for the first two or three years, but he had been located in London since then, in charge of the English office of his firm, to which he had been suddenly appointed a month after he and Betty, who had been sweethearts, had had a spectacular quarrel.Nancy stayed by the celebration until about half past nine, and then Dick put her into a taxi-cab, and she fled back to her responsibilities as mistress of Outside Inn, agreeing to meet the others later for the rounding out of the evening. As she drew up before the big85gate the courtyard seemed practically deserted. The waitresses were busy clearing away the few cluttered tables left by the last late guests, and in one sheltered corner a man and a girl were frankly holding hands across the table, while they whispered earnestly of some impending parting. The big canopy of striped awning cloth had been drawn over the tables, as the rather heavy air of the evening bad been punctured occasionally by a swift scattering of rain. Nancy was half-way across the court before she realized that Collier Pratt was still occupying his accustomed seat under the shadow of the big Venus. She had not seen him face to face or communicated with him since the day she had looked him up in the telephone book and sent his cape to him by special messenger. She stopped involuntarily as she reached his side, and he looked up and smiled as he recognized her.“You’re late again, Miss Ann Martin,” he said, rising and pulling out a chair for her opposite his own. “I think perhaps I can pull the wires and procure you some sustenance if you will say the word.”“I’ve no word to say,” Nancy said, “but how86do you do? I’ve just dined elsewhere. I only stopped in here for a moment to get something—something I left here at lunch.”“In that case I’ll offer you a drop of Michael’s tea in my water glass.” He poured a tablespoonful or so of claret from the teapot into the glass of ice-water before him, and added several lumps of sugar to the concoction, which he stirred gravely for some time before he offered it to her. “I never touch water myself. This iseau rougieas the French children drink it. It’s really better for you than ice-cream and a glass of water.”“And less American,” Nancy murmured with her eyes down.“And less American,” he acquiesced blandly.Nancy sipped her drink, and Collier Pratt stirred the dregs in his coffee cup—Nancy had overheard some of her patrons remarking on the curious habits of a man who consumed a pot of tea and a pot of coffee at one and the same meal—and they regarded each other for some time in silence. Michael and Hildeguard, Molly and Dolly and two others of the staff of girls were grouped in the doorway exactly in Nancy’s range of vision, and whispering to one87another excitedly concerning the phenomenon that met their eyes.“The little girl?” Nancy said, trying to ignore the composite scrutiny to which she was being subjected, by turning determinedly to her companion, “the little girl that you spoke of—is she well?”“She’s as well as a motherless baby could be, subjected to the irregularities of a life like mine. Still she seems to thrive on it.”“Is she yours?” Nancy asked.“Yes, she’s mine,” Collier Pratt said, gravely dismissing the subject, and leaving Nancy half ashamed of her boldness in putting the question, half possessed of a madness to know the answer at any cost.“I’ve discovered something very interesting,” Collier Pratt said, after an interval in which Nancy felt that he was perfectly cognizant of her struggle with her curiosity; “in fact, it’s one of the most interesting discoveries that I have made in the course of a not unadventurous life. Do you come to this restaurant often?”“Quite often,” Nancy equivocated, “earlier in the day. For luncheon and for tea.”“I come here almost every night of my life,”88Collier Pratt declared, “and I intend to continue to come so long asle bon Dieuspares me my health and my epicurean taste. You know that I spoke of the food here before. The character of it has changed entirely. It’s unmistakably French now, not to say Parisian. Outside of Paris or Vienna I have never tasted such soups, such sauce, such delicate and suggestive flavors. My entire existence has been revolutionized by the experience. I am no longer the lonely and unhappy man you discovered at this gate a short month ago. I can not cavil at an America that furnishes me with such food as I get in this place.“Man may live without friends, and may live without books.But civilized man can not live without cooks,”Nancy quoted sententiously.“Exactly. The whole point is that the cooking here is civilized. Oh! you ought to come here to dinner, my friend. I don’t know what the luncheons and teas are like—”“They’re very good,” Nancy said.“But not like the dinners, I’ll wager. The dinners are the very last word! I don’t know89why this place isn’t famous. Of course, I do my best to keep it a secret from the artistic rabble I know. It would be overrun with them in a week, and its character utterly ruined.”“I wonder if it would.”“Oh! I’m sure of it.”“What is your discovery?” Nancy asked.Collier Pratt leaned dramatically closer to her, and Nancy instinctively bent forward across the tiny table until her face was very near to his.“Do you know anything about the price of foodstuffs?” he demanded.“A little,” Nancy admitted.“You know then that the price of every commodity has soared unthinkably high, that the mere problem of providing the ordinary commonplace meal at the ordinary commonplace restaurant has become almost unsolvable to the proprietors? Most of the eating places in New York are run at a loss, while the management is marking time and praying for a change in conditions. Well, here we have a restaurant opening at the most crucial period in the history of such enterprises, offering its patrons the delicacies of the season most exquisitely90cooked, at what is practically the minimum price for a respectable meal.”“That’s true, isn’t it?”“More than that, there are people who come here, who order one thing and get another, and the thing they get is always a much more elaborate and extravagant dish than the one they asked for. I’ve seen that happen again and again.”“Have you?” Nancy asked faintly, shrinking a little beneath the intentness of his look. “How—how do you account for it?”“There’s only one way to account for it.”“Do you think that there is an—an unlimited amount of capital behind it?”“I think that goes without saying,” he said; “there must be an unlimited amount of capital behind it, or it wouldn’t continue to flourish like a green bay tree; but that’s not in the nature of a discovery. Anybody with any power of observation at all would have come to that conclusion long since.”“Then, what is it you have found out?” Nancy asked, quaking.“My discovery is—” Collier Pratt paused for the whole effect of his revelation to penetrate91to her consciousness, “that this whole outfit is runphilanthropically.”“Philanthropically?”“Don’t you see? There can’t be any other explanation of it. It’s an eleemosynary institution. That’s what it is.”Nancy met his expectant eyes with a trifle of wildness in her own, but he continued to hold her gaze triumphantly.“Don’t you see,” he repeated, “doesn’t everything point to that as the only possible explanation? It’s some rich woman’s plaything. That accounts for the food, the setting,—everything in fact that has puzzled us. Amateur,—that’s the word; effective, delightful but inexperienced. It sticks out all over the place.”“The food isn’t amateur,” Nancy said, a little resentfully.“Nothing is amateur but the spirit behind it, through which we profit. Don’t you see?”“I’m beginning to see,” Nancy admitted, “perhaps you are right. I guess the place is run philanthropically. I—I hadn’t quite realized it before.”“What did you think?”“I knew that the—one who was running it92wasn’t quite sure where she was coming out, but I didn’t think of it is an eleemosynary institution.”“Of course, it is.”“It’s an unscrupulous sort of charity, then,” Nancy mused, “if it’s masquerading as self-respecting and self-supporting. I—I’ve never approved of things like that.”“Why quarrel with a scheme so beneficent?”“Don’t you care?” Nancy asked with a catch in her voice that was very like an appeal.He shook his head.“Why should I?” he smiled.“Then I don’t care, either,” she decided with an emphasis that was entirely lost on the man on the other side of the table.

One night during the latter part of July Betty had a birthday, and according to immemorial custom Caroline and Nancy and Dick and Billy helped her to celebrate it at one of the old-fashioned down-town hotels where they had ordered practically the same dinner for her anniversaries ever since they had been grown up enough to celebrate them unchaperoned. Caroline’s brother, Preston, had made a sixth member of the party for the first two or three years, but he had been located in London since then, in charge of the English office of his firm, to which he had been suddenly appointed a month after he and Betty, who had been sweethearts, had had a spectacular quarrel.

Nancy stayed by the celebration until about half past nine, and then Dick put her into a taxi-cab, and she fled back to her responsibilities as mistress of Outside Inn, agreeing to meet the others later for the rounding out of the evening. As she drew up before the big85gate the courtyard seemed practically deserted. The waitresses were busy clearing away the few cluttered tables left by the last late guests, and in one sheltered corner a man and a girl were frankly holding hands across the table, while they whispered earnestly of some impending parting. The big canopy of striped awning cloth had been drawn over the tables, as the rather heavy air of the evening bad been punctured occasionally by a swift scattering of rain. Nancy was half-way across the court before she realized that Collier Pratt was still occupying his accustomed seat under the shadow of the big Venus. She had not seen him face to face or communicated with him since the day she had looked him up in the telephone book and sent his cape to him by special messenger. She stopped involuntarily as she reached his side, and he looked up and smiled as he recognized her.

“You’re late again, Miss Ann Martin,” he said, rising and pulling out a chair for her opposite his own. “I think perhaps I can pull the wires and procure you some sustenance if you will say the word.”

“I’ve no word to say,” Nancy said, “but how86do you do? I’ve just dined elsewhere. I only stopped in here for a moment to get something—something I left here at lunch.”

“In that case I’ll offer you a drop of Michael’s tea in my water glass.” He poured a tablespoonful or so of claret from the teapot into the glass of ice-water before him, and added several lumps of sugar to the concoction, which he stirred gravely for some time before he offered it to her. “I never touch water myself. This iseau rougieas the French children drink it. It’s really better for you than ice-cream and a glass of water.”

“And less American,” Nancy murmured with her eyes down.

“And less American,” he acquiesced blandly.

Nancy sipped her drink, and Collier Pratt stirred the dregs in his coffee cup—Nancy had overheard some of her patrons remarking on the curious habits of a man who consumed a pot of tea and a pot of coffee at one and the same meal—and they regarded each other for some time in silence. Michael and Hildeguard, Molly and Dolly and two others of the staff of girls were grouped in the doorway exactly in Nancy’s range of vision, and whispering to one87another excitedly concerning the phenomenon that met their eyes.

“The little girl?” Nancy said, trying to ignore the composite scrutiny to which she was being subjected, by turning determinedly to her companion, “the little girl that you spoke of—is she well?”

“She’s as well as a motherless baby could be, subjected to the irregularities of a life like mine. Still she seems to thrive on it.”

“Is she yours?” Nancy asked.

“Yes, she’s mine,” Collier Pratt said, gravely dismissing the subject, and leaving Nancy half ashamed of her boldness in putting the question, half possessed of a madness to know the answer at any cost.

“I’ve discovered something very interesting,” Collier Pratt said, after an interval in which Nancy felt that he was perfectly cognizant of her struggle with her curiosity; “in fact, it’s one of the most interesting discoveries that I have made in the course of a not unadventurous life. Do you come to this restaurant often?”

“Quite often,” Nancy equivocated, “earlier in the day. For luncheon and for tea.”

“I come here almost every night of my life,”88Collier Pratt declared, “and I intend to continue to come so long asle bon Dieuspares me my health and my epicurean taste. You know that I spoke of the food here before. The character of it has changed entirely. It’s unmistakably French now, not to say Parisian. Outside of Paris or Vienna I have never tasted such soups, such sauce, such delicate and suggestive flavors. My entire existence has been revolutionized by the experience. I am no longer the lonely and unhappy man you discovered at this gate a short month ago. I can not cavil at an America that furnishes me with such food as I get in this place.

“Man may live without friends, and may live without books.But civilized man can not live without cooks,”

“Man may live without friends, and may live without books.But civilized man can not live without cooks,”

“Man may live without friends, and may live without books.

But civilized man can not live without cooks,”

Nancy quoted sententiously.

“Exactly. The whole point is that the cooking here is civilized. Oh! you ought to come here to dinner, my friend. I don’t know what the luncheons and teas are like—”

“They’re very good,” Nancy said.

“But not like the dinners, I’ll wager. The dinners are the very last word! I don’t know89why this place isn’t famous. Of course, I do my best to keep it a secret from the artistic rabble I know. It would be overrun with them in a week, and its character utterly ruined.”

“I wonder if it would.”

“Oh! I’m sure of it.”

“What is your discovery?” Nancy asked.

Collier Pratt leaned dramatically closer to her, and Nancy instinctively bent forward across the tiny table until her face was very near to his.

“Do you know anything about the price of foodstuffs?” he demanded.

“A little,” Nancy admitted.

“You know then that the price of every commodity has soared unthinkably high, that the mere problem of providing the ordinary commonplace meal at the ordinary commonplace restaurant has become almost unsolvable to the proprietors? Most of the eating places in New York are run at a loss, while the management is marking time and praying for a change in conditions. Well, here we have a restaurant opening at the most crucial period in the history of such enterprises, offering its patrons the delicacies of the season most exquisitely90cooked, at what is practically the minimum price for a respectable meal.”

“That’s true, isn’t it?”

“More than that, there are people who come here, who order one thing and get another, and the thing they get is always a much more elaborate and extravagant dish than the one they asked for. I’ve seen that happen again and again.”

“Have you?” Nancy asked faintly, shrinking a little beneath the intentness of his look. “How—how do you account for it?”

“There’s only one way to account for it.”

“Do you think that there is an—an unlimited amount of capital behind it?”

“I think that goes without saying,” he said; “there must be an unlimited amount of capital behind it, or it wouldn’t continue to flourish like a green bay tree; but that’s not in the nature of a discovery. Anybody with any power of observation at all would have come to that conclusion long since.”

“Then, what is it you have found out?” Nancy asked, quaking.

“My discovery is—” Collier Pratt paused for the whole effect of his revelation to penetrate91to her consciousness, “that this whole outfit is runphilanthropically.”

“Philanthropically?”

“Don’t you see? There can’t be any other explanation of it. It’s an eleemosynary institution. That’s what it is.”

Nancy met his expectant eyes with a trifle of wildness in her own, but he continued to hold her gaze triumphantly.

“Don’t you see,” he repeated, “doesn’t everything point to that as the only possible explanation? It’s some rich woman’s plaything. That accounts for the food, the setting,—everything in fact that has puzzled us. Amateur,—that’s the word; effective, delightful but inexperienced. It sticks out all over the place.”

“The food isn’t amateur,” Nancy said, a little resentfully.

“Nothing is amateur but the spirit behind it, through which we profit. Don’t you see?”

“I’m beginning to see,” Nancy admitted, “perhaps you are right. I guess the place is run philanthropically. I—I hadn’t quite realized it before.”

“What did you think?”

“I knew that the—one who was running it92wasn’t quite sure where she was coming out, but I didn’t think of it is an eleemosynary institution.”

“Of course, it is.”

“It’s an unscrupulous sort of charity, then,” Nancy mused, “if it’s masquerading as self-respecting and self-supporting. I—I’ve never approved of things like that.”

“Why quarrel with a scheme so beneficent?”

“Don’t you care?” Nancy asked with a catch in her voice that was very like an appeal.

He shook his head.

“Why should I?” he smiled.

“Then I don’t care, either,” she decided with an emphasis that was entirely lost on the man on the other side of the table.

Back to IndexNext