OUTSIDE INN

“I Elijah Peebles Martin, of the city and county of Harrison, in the state of Rhode Island, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, do make and declare the following, as and for, my last will and testament.’ ... I wish you’d take your head out of that barrel, Nancy, and listen to the document that is going to make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

“You don’t deserve to know,” the blond young man in the Norfolk jacket assured her, adjusting himself more firmly to the idiosyncrasies of the rackety step-ladder he was striding. “You’re not human about this. Here you are suddenly in possession of a fortune. Money enough to make you independently wealthy for the rest of your life—money you didn’t know the existence of, two weeks ago—fed to you by a gratuitous providence. A legacy is a legacy, and deserves to be treated as such, and I propose to see that it gets what it deserves, without any more shilly-shallying.”

“I’m a busy woman,” Nancy groaned, “and I’ve hammered my finger to a pulp, trying to open this crate, while you perch on a broken step-ladder and prate to me of legacies. The saucers to these cups may be in here, and I can’t wait to find out. I’m perfectly crazy about this ware. It’s English—Wedgewood, you know.”

he finished lugubriously, in a wailing baritone, taking an imaginary encore by bowing a head picturesquely adorned with a crop of excelsior curls, accumulated during his activities in and about the barrel.

“I believe you would. You are a thorough child, when you set about a thing. I’ll bet you know the restaurant business from A to Z.”

“I do. You know, I studied the organization of every well-run restaurant in New York, when I was doing field work from Teachers’ College. I’ve read every book on the subject of Diet and Nutrition and Domestic Economy that I could get my hands on. I’m just ready now for the practical application of all my theories.”

“Nancy Calory Martin is your real name. I don’t blame you for hating to give up this tea-room idea. You’ve dug so deep into the possibilities of it, that you want to go through. I get that.”

Nancy’s eyes widened in satiric admiration.

“You could understand almost anything, couldn’t you, Billy?” she mocked.

“Sketchy is the better word, don’t you think so, Billy?”

“Slight as it is”—except for a prodigious frown, Billy ignored the interruption, though he took advantage of her suddenly upright position to encircle her neatly with a barrel hoop, as if she were the iron peg in a game of quoits—“enables me to put the fact before you in a few short, sharp, well-chosen sentences. I won’t again attempt to read the document—”

“You’d better not,” Nancy interrupted witheringly, “your delivery is poor. Besides, I don’t want to know what is in that will. If I had, it stands to reason that I would have found out long before this. I’ve had it three days.”

“You’ve had it three days and never once looked into it?” Billy groaned. “Who started all this scandal about the curiosity of women, anyway?”

“I don’t want to know what’s in it,” Nancy insisted. “As long as I’m not in possession of any definite facts, I can ignore it. I’ve got the kind of mind that must deal with concrete facts concretely.”

Billy grinned. “I’d hate the job of trying to subpœna you,” he said, “but you’d make a corking good witness, on the stand. Of course, you can proceed for a certain length of time on the theory that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but take it from me, little girl, what you ought to know and don’t know is the thing that’s bound to hurt you most tremendously in the long run. What are you afraid of, anyway, Nancy?”

“If you really don’t want the money,” Billy said, “it’s your privilege to endow some institution—”

“You know very well that I can’t get rid of money that way,” Nancy cried hotly. “I am at least a responsible person. I don’t believe in these promiscuous, eleemosynary institutions. It would be against all my principles to contribute money to any such philanthropy. I know too much about them—but he didn’t. He could have disposed of his money to any one of a dozen of these mid-Victorian charities, but no—he was just one of those old parties that want to shift their responsibilities on to young shoulders, and so he chose mine.”

“You don’t speak very kindly of your dear dead relative.”

“If I weren’t engaged to Caroline, who is a jealous woman, though I say it as shouldn’t, I’d be tempted to undertake the management of your fortune myself,” Billy said reflectively; “as it is—honor—”

“I know what I want to do with my life,” Nancy continued, as if he had not spoken. “I want to run an efficiency tea-room and serve dinner and breakfast and tea to my fellow men and women. I want the perfectly balanced ration, perfectly served, to be my contribution to the cause of humanity.”

“I’ve just got capital enough to get it going right; to swing it for the first year, even if I don’t make a cent on it. It’s my one big chance to do my share in the world, and to work out my own salvation. This legacy is a menace to all my dreams and plans.”

“I see that,” Billy said. “What I don’t see is what you gain by refusing to let it catch up with you.”

“You’re not it till you’re tagged. That’s all. If I don’t know whether my income is going to be five thousand dollars or twenty-five thousand a year, I can go on unpacking teacups with—”

Billy whistled.

“Five thousand or twenty-five—my darling Nancy! You’ll have fifty thousand a year at the very lowest estimate. The actual money is more than five hundred thousand dollars. The stock in the Union Rubber Company will amount to as much again, maybe twice as much. You’re a real heiress, my dear, with wads of real money to show for it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Yes’um. Fifty thousand at least.”

Nancy’s pallor increased. She closed her eyes.

“Don’t do that,” Billy said sharply. “No woman can faint on me just because she’s had money left her. You make me feel like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.”

Nancy clutched at his sleeve.

“Don’t, Billy!” she besought. “I’m past joking now. Fifty thousand a year! Why, Uncle Elijah bought fifteen-dollar suits and fifteen-cent lunches. How could a retired sea captain get all that money by investing in a little rubber, and getting to be president of a little rubber company?”

“That’s how. Be a good sensible girl, and face the music.”

“I’ll have to give up the tea-room.”

Billy laid a consolatory arm over her shoulder, and patted her awkwardly.

Nancy turned a tragic face to him.

“I tell you I’m not grateful to him,” she said, “and I doubt if I ever will be. I don’t want the stupid money. I want to work life out in my own way. I know I’ve got it in me, and I want my chance to prove it. I want to give myself, my own brain and strength, to the job I’ve selected as mine. Now, it’s all spoiled for me. I’m subsidized. I’m done for, and I can’t see any way out of it.”

“You can give the money away.”

“I can’t. Giving money away is a special science of itself. If I devote my life to doing that as it should be done, I won’t have time or energy for anything else. I’m not a philanthropist in that sense. I wanted my restaurant to be philanthropic only incidentally. I wanted to cram my patrons with the full value of their money’s worth of good nourishing food; to increase the efficiency of hundreds of people who never suspected I was doing it, by scientific methods of feeding. That’s my dream.”

“A good little dream, all right.”

“You could buy a chain of restaurants with the money you’ve got.”

“I don’t want a chain of restaurants.”

“You can endow a perpetual diet squad. You can buy out the whole Life Extension Institute. If you would only stop to think of the advantages of having all the money you wanted to spend on anything you wanted, you’d—”

“Billy,” Nancy said solemnly, “I’ve been through all that. If I had thought I would have been a better person with a great deal of money at my disposal, I—I might have—”

“Married Dick,” Billy finished for her. “I forgot that interesting possibility. I suppose to a girl who has just turned down a cold five millions, this meager little proposition”—he flourished the crumpled document in his hand—“has no real allure. Lord! What a world this is. You’ll marry Dick yet. Them as has—gits. It never rains but it pours. To the victor belong the spoils, et cetera, et cetera—”

“Money simply does not interest me.”

“Dick interests you. I don’t know to what extent, but he interests you.”

“Don’t be sentimental, Billy. Just because you’re in love with Caroline, you can’t make all your other friends marry each other. Tell me what to do about this legacy. What is customary when you get a lump of money like that? I suppose I’ll have to begin to get rid of all this immediately.” There was more than a hint of tears in her voice, but she smiled at Billy bravely. “I’m so perfectly crazy about these—these cups and saucers, Billy. See the lovely way that rose is split to fit into the design. Oh, when do I come into possession, anyway?”

“You don’t come into possession right away, you know. You don’t inherit for a couple of years, under the Rhode Island law. The formalities will take—”

“Billy Boynton, do you mean to say that I won’t have to do a blessed thing about this money for two years?” Nancy shrieked.

“Why, no. It takes a certain amount of red tape to settle an estate, to probate a will, etc., and the law allows a period of time, varying in different states—”

“Oho! Is there anything in all this universe so stupid as a man?” Nancy interrupted fervently. “Why didn’t you tell me that before? Do you suppose I care how much money I have two years from now? Two years of freedom, why, that’s all I want, Billy. There you’ve been sitting up winking and blinking at me like a sympathetic old owl, when all I needed to know was that I had two years of grace. Of course, I’ll go on with my tea-room, and not a soul shall know the difference.”

“While the feminine temperament has my hearty admiration and my most cordial endorsement,” Billy murmured, “there are things about it—”

“I won’t have to tell anybody, will I?”

“There’s no law to that effect. If your friends don’t know it from you, they’re not likely to hear it.”

“I haven’t mentioned it,” Nancy said. “I only told you, because it seemed rather in your line of work, and I was getting so much mail about it, I thought it would be wise to have some one look it over.”

“I’ve given up my law practice and Caroline for three days in your service.”

“You’ve done more than well, Billy, and I’m grateful to you. Of course, you would have saved me days of nervous wear and tear if it had only occurred to you to tell me the one simple little thing that was the essential point of the whole matter. If I had known that I didn’t inherit for two years, I wouldn’t have cared what was in that will.”

Billy stared at her feelingly.

“A peculiar sensation always comes over me,” he said musingly, “after I spend several hours uninterruptedly in the society of a woman who is using her mind in any way. I couldn’t explain it to you exactly. It’s a kind of impression that my own brain has begun to disintegrate, and to—”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Billy.” Nancy soothed him sweetly,—Billy was not one of the people to whom she habitually allowed full conversational leeway: “Swear you won’t tell Caroline or Betty—or Dick.”

“I swear.”

Nancy held out her hand to him.

Billy bowed over her hand, lingeringly and politely, but once releasing it, he shook his big frame, and straightening up, drew a long deep breath of something very like relief.

“With all deference to your delightful sex,” he said, “the only society that I’m dying for at the present moment is that of the old family bar-keep.”

As Billy left her, Nancy turned to her basement window, and stood looking out at the quaint stone court he had to cross in order to reach the high gate that guarded the entrance to the marble worker’s establishment, under the shadow of which it was her intention to open her out-of-door tea-room. She watched him dreamily is he made his way among the cinerary urns, the busts and statues and bas-reliefs that were a part of the stock in trade of her incongruous business associate.

She saw the gritty, gray paving stones of the court cleared of their litter, and scoured free from discoloration and grime, set with dozens of little tables immaculate in snowy napery and shiny silver, and arranged with careful irregularity at the most alluring angle. She saw a staff of Hebe-like waitresses in blue chambray and pink ribbons, to match the chinaware, and all bearing a marked resemblance to herself in her last flattering photograph, moving among a crowd of well brought up but palpably impoverished young people,—mostly social workers and artists. They were all young, and most of them very beautiful. In all her twenty-five years, she had never before been so close to a vision realized, as she was at that moment.

“Outside Inn,” she said to herself, still smiling. “It’s a perfect name for it, really. Outside Inn!”

Ann Martin was an orphan of New England extraction. Her father, the eldest child of a simple unpretentious country family in Western Massachusetts, had been a brilliant but erratic throw-back to Mayflower traditions and Puritan intellectualism. He had married a girl with much the same ancestry as his own, but herself born and brought up in New York, and of a generation to which the assumption of prerogative was a natural rather than an acquired characteristic. The possession of a comfortable degree of fortune and culture was a matter of course with Ann Winslow, while to poor David Martin education in the finer things of life, and the opportunity to indulge his taste in the choice of surroundings and associates, were hard-won privileges.

From her lovely mother—Ann Winslow had been more than a merely attractive or pretty woman; she had the real grace and distinction, and purity of profile that placed her in the actual category of beauty,—Nancy had inherited a healthy and equitable outlook on life, while her father, irresistible and impracticable being that he was, had endowed her with a certain eccentric and adventurous spirit in the investigation of it.

The affairs of the Inn progressed rapidly. It was in the first week of May that Nancy and Billy had their memorable discussion of her situation. By the latter part of June, when she could be reasonably sure of a succession of propitious days and nights, for she had set her heart on balmy weather conditions, Nancy expected to have her formal opening,—a dinner which not only initiated her establishment, but submitted it to the approval of her own group of intimate friends, who were to be her guests on that occasion.

Meantime, the most extensive and discriminating preparations were going forward. Billy and Dick were present one afternoon by special request when Betty and Nancy were interviewing a contingent of waitresses.

“Trot ’em along,” Billy said; “where are they anyway?”

“In the room in front.” They were in the smallest of the nest of attic rooms that Nancy planned to make her winter quarters. “Michael receives them, and shows them in here one by one.”

“You like Michael then?” Dick asked. “I always said his talents were hidden at our place. He has a soul above the job of handy man on a Long Island farm.”

“He’s certainly a handy man here,” Nancy said; “I couldn’t live without him.”

“The lucky dog,” Billy said, with a side glance at Dick.

“You see,” Betty explained, “the girl comes in, and we ask her questions. Then if I don’t like her I take my pencil from behind my ear, and rap against my palm with it. If Nancy doesn’t like her she says, ‘You’re losing a hairpin, Betty.’ If we like her we rub our hands together.”

“It’s a good system,” Billy said, “but I don’t see why Nancy doesn’t take her pencil from behind her ear, or why you don’t say to her—”

“I wouldn’t put a pencil behind my ear,” Nancy said scathingly.

“And she never loses a hairpin,” Betty cut in. “If I approve this system of signals I don’t see what you have to complain of. Nancy couldn’t get a pencil behind her ear even if she wanted to. It’s only a criminal ear like mine that accommodates a pencil.”

“Speaking of ears,” Dick said, looking at his watch, “let’s get on with the beauty show. I have to take my mother to see Boris to-night, and she has an odd notion of being on time.”

“Aw right,” Betty said. “Here’s Michael. Bring in the first one immediately, Michael.”

“Sure an’ I will that, Miss Pope.” The old family servitor of the Thorndykes pulled a deliberate lid over a twinkling left eye by way of acknowledging the presence of his young master. “There’s quite a display of thim this time.”

Betty took her pencil from behind her ear.

“You’re losing a hair—” Nancy began, but Dick and Billy exchanged glances and began rubbing their hands together energetically and enthusiastically.

“I’m sorry,” Nancy said crisply, “but you’re a little too tall for our purpose.”

“And too blonde,” Betty added with a bland dismissing smile. “We’re looking for a special type of girl.”

“I understood you were looking for a waitress,” the girl said pertly, with her eyes on Billy.

“I was,” Billy answered, “but I’m not now. My—my wife won’t let me.” He waved an inclusive hand in the direction of Nancy and Betty.

Before she could begin again, applicant number two stood before them,—a comfortable, kind-eyed girl, no longer very young but with efficiency written all over her, despite the shyness that beset her.

Nancy rubbed her hands with satisfaction and looked at Betty, who beamed back at her. The girl, encouraged by Nancy’s kindly smile took a step forward, and began to recite her qualifications for the position. Dick fumbled with a fountain-pen which he placed elaborately behind his ear for an instant, and then as ostentatiously removed.

“I think you’re losing a hairpin, Dick,” Billy suggested solicitously, as Nancy, ignoring their existence entirely, proceeded to make terms with the newcomer.

“Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like—” Billy was addressing Molly gravely when Dick slipped a friendly but firm hand over his jugular region, and cut off his utterance.

“He’s not feeling quite himself,” he explained suavely to Dolly, “but we’ll bring him around soon.—I think you’ll find Miss Martin an ideal person to work for, and the salary and the hours unusually satisfactory.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Molly and Dolly together, in the English manner which showed the excellence of their training.

There were several other dubby creatures so much out of the picture that they were not even considered, and then Michael brought in what he called “a grand girl,” and left her standing statuesquely in their midst.

“With large lovely arms and a neck like a tower,” Dick quoted in his throat.

Nancy engaged her without enthusiasm.

“She’ll draw,” she said briefly. “Personally, I dislike these Alma Tadema girls.”

“What the men see,” Betty said, curling around the better part of two straight dining chairs, in the moment of relaxation that followed the final disposition of the business of the day, “in a girl like that first one is one of the mysteries of existence.”

“I know it,” Nancy agreed, with New England colloquialism. “You feel reasonably allied to them as a sex, and then suddenly they show some vulgar preference for a woman like that, and it’s all off.”

“This from the woman who thinks my chauffeur is an ideal of manly beauty,” Dick scoffed, “a dimpled man with a little finger ring.”

“He can run a car, though,” Nancy retorted.

“I’ll bet little blue eyes could run a restaurant.”

“That was just the trouble,—she would have been running mine in twenty-four hours. Oh! I think what you men really like is a bossy woman.”

“Now, what a woman really likes in a man—” Betty began, “is—is—”

“Quality,” Nancy finished for her succinctly.

“I wonder—” Dick mused. “I should have said finish.”

“Almost any kind of finish so long as it is smooth enough,” Billy supplemented. “Look at the way they eat up this artistic and poetic veneer.”

“Look at the way they mangle their metaphors,” Nancy complained to Betty.

“I know what I really like in a woman,” Dick whispered to Nancy, as he helped her into her coat just before they started out together, “and you know what I like, too. That’s one of the subjects that needs no discussion between us.”

Betty and Billy walking up the avenue ahead of them,—Outside Inn was located in one of the cross-streets in the thirties,—were discussing their relation to one another.

“Lord, yes,” said Billy, accelerating his pace, suggestively in the hope of getting Betty home in good time for him to dress to keep his engagement with Caroline.

She laughed at herself as she brushed the sleep out of her eyes, and drew the gradual long breaths that soothed the physical agitation that still beset her.

“I’m scared,” she said, “I’m as excited and nervous as a youngster on circus day.—Oh! I’m glad the sun shines.”

“You were moaning and groaning in your sleep,” she said, in the strident accents of her New England birthplace, “so you’ll have to drink this before I give you a living thing for your breakfast.”

“I will, Hitty,” Nancy said, “and thank you kindly. Now I know you’ve been making pop-overs, and are afraid they will disagree with me. I’m glad—for I need the moral effect of them.”

“I dunno whether pop-overs is so moral, or so immoral if it comes to that. I notice it’s always the folks that ain’t had much to do with morals one way or the other that’s so almighty glib about them.”

“I guess you’d be a good sight more excited if you was going to be married”—Hitty was a widow of twenty-five years’ standing—“and according to my way of thinking ’twould be a good deal more suitable,” she added darkly. “I don’t take much stock in this hotel business. In my day there warn’t no such newfangled foolishness for a girl to take up with instead o’ getting married and settled down. When I was your age I was working on my second set o’ baby clothes.”

“Don’t scold, Hitty,” Nancy coaxed. “I could make perfectly good baby clothes if I needed to. Don’t you think I’ll be of more use in the world serving nourishing food to hordes of hungry men and women than making baby clothes for one hypothetical baby?”

“If ever there was a woman who had something of her own to fuss over,” Nancy cried ecstatically, “I’m that woman to-day, Hitty. You’re a professional Puritan, and you don’t understand the broader aspects of the maternal instinct.” She sprang out of bed, and tucked her bare pink toes into the fur bordered blue mules that peeped from under the bed, and slipped into the wadded blue silk bathrobe that lay on the chair beside her. “Is my bath drawn, Hitty?”

“Your bath is drawed,” Hitty acknowledged sourly, “and your breakfast will be on the table in half an hour by the clock.”

“I suppose I must require that corrective New England influence,” Nancy said to herself, as she tried the temperature of her bath and found it frigid, “just as some people need acid in their diet. If my mother were alive, I wonder what she would have said to me this morning.”

From the basement kitchen to the ground-floor serving-room in the rear, space cunningly coaxed from the reluctant marble worker, the mechanism of Nancy’s equipment was as perfect as lavish expenditure and scientific management could make it. The kitchen gleamed with copper and granite ware; huge pots for soup and vegetables, mammoth double boilers of white enamel,—Nancy was firm in her conviction that rice and cereal could be cooked in nothing but white enamel,—rows upon rows of shelves methodically set with containers and casseroles and odd-shaped metal serving-dishes, as well as the ubiquitous blue and rose-color chinaware presenting its gay surface from every available bit of space.

The courtyard itself was a brave spectacle in its final aspect of background for the detail and paraphernalia of polite dining. The more unself-conscious of the statues, the nymphs and nereids and Venuses, she managed either to relegate to the storehouse within, or to add a few cunningly draped vines to the nonchalance of their effect, while the gargoyles and Roman columns and some of the least ambitious of the fountain-models she was able to adapt delightfully to her outrageous ideal of arrangement. Dick had denuded several smart florist shops to furnish her with field flowers enough to develop her decorative scheme, which included strangely the stringing of half a dozen huge Chinese lanterns that even in the daylight took on a meteoric light and glow.

Two nondescript Pagan gentlemen of Titanesque proportions had joined the watch of the conventional leonine twins, and the big gate now stood hospitably open, over it swinging the new sign in gallant crimson and white, that announced to all the world that Outside Inn was even at that moment, at its most punctilious service.

“It seems like a real restaurant,” Caroline said wonderingly.

“What did you think it would seem like?” Betty asked argumentatively. “Just because Nancy is the best friend you have in the world, and you’re familiar with her in pig-tails and a dressing-gown doesn’t argue that she is incapable of managing an undertaking like this as well as if she were a perfect stranger.”

“I don’t suppose it does,” Caroline mused, “but someway I’d feel easier about a perfect stranger investing her last cent in such a venture. I don’t see how she can possibly make it pay, and I don’t feel as if I could ever have a comfortable moment again until I knew whether she could or not.—What are you looking so guilty about, Billy?”

“Are you deceiving Caroline in some way?” Dick inquired.

“No, he isn’t,” Caroline answered for him, “though he has full permission to if he wants.”

“The time may come when he will avail himself of that permission,” Betty said; “you ought to be careful how you tempt Fate, Caroline.”

“She ought to be,” Billy groaned, “but the fact is that I am not one of the things she is superstitious about. Pipe the dame at the corner table with the lorgnette. Classy, isn’t she?”

“Friend of my aunt’s,” Dick said, acknowledging the lady’s salute.

“And the Belasco adventuress in the corner.”

“My stenographer,” Dick explained, bowing again.

“I’ve got a bunch of men coming,” Billy said; “if they put the place on the bum you’ve got to help me bounce them, Dick.”

“Who serves the things,—puts the meat on the plates, and dishes up the vegetables?”

“The cook—Nancy won’t let me call him the chef—because she is going to make a specialty of the southern element of his education. He has a serving-table by his range and he cuts up the meat and fowl, and dishes up the vegetables. In a bigger establishment he would have a helper to do that.”

“Why can’t Michael help him?” Dick asked.

“Respect for his superiors is not one of Michael’s most salient characteristics,” Dick twinkled. “Nancy and I have a scheme for making a match between him and Hitty.”

“Here’s the soup,” Betty announced. “Nancy’s idea is to have everything perfectly simple, and—and—”

“Simply perfect,” Billy assisted her.

“Isn’t she going to eat with us?” Dick asked.

“She can’t. She’s busy getting it going just at present. She may appear later.”

“Somebody’s got to direct this pageant, old top,” Billy reminded him.

“The soup is perfect,” Caroline said seriously. “It is simple—with that deceptive simplicity of a Paris morning frock.”

“French home cooking is all like that,” Dick said. “I like purée of forget-me-nots!”

“Molly or Dolly, I can’t tell the difference between you,” Billy said, “extend our compliments to Miss Martin, and tell her that this course is a triumph.”

“Wait till you see the roast, sir.”

“This variety of asparagus is expensive,” Caroline said; “she can’t do things like this at seventy-five cents a head. She’ll ruin herself.”

“I don’t see how she can,” Dick said thoughtfully, “with the price of foodstuffs soaring sky-high.”

“I never for a moment expected it to pay,” Betty said, “but think of the run she will have for her money, and the experience we’ll get out of it.”

“You’re in it for the romance there is in it, Betty. I must confess it isn’t altogether my idea of a good time,” Caroline said.

“I know, you would go in for military training for women, and that sort of thing. There’s a woman over there asking for more olives, and she’s eaten a plate full of them already.”

“They’re as big as hen’s eggs anyhow,” Caroline groaned, “and almost as extravagant. I don’t see how Nancy’ll go through the first month at this rate. There she comes now. Doesn’t she look nice in that color of green?”

“How do you like my party?” Nancy asked, slipping into the empty chair between Dick and Billy; “isn’t the food good and nourishing, and aren’t there a lot of nice-looking people here?”

“Very much, and it is, and there are,” Dick answered with affectionate eyes on her.

“The salad is alligator pear served in half sections, with French dressing,” she said dreamily. “I’m too happy to eat, but I’ll have some with you. Look at them all, don’t they look relaxed and soothed and refreshed? Every individual has a perfectly balanced ration of the most superlatively good quality, slowly beginning to assimilate within him.”

“I don’t see many respectable working girls,” Billy said.

“There are though,—from the different shops and offices on the avenue. There is a contingent from the Columbia summer school coming to-morrow evening. This group coming in now is newspaper people.”

“Who’s the fellow sitting over in the corner with that Vie de Bohême hat? He looks familiar, but I can’t seem to place him.”

“Does he sell?” Caroline asked.

“No, they say he’s awfully poor, refuses to paint down to the public taste. What the deuce is his name—oh! I know, Collier Pratt—do you know him, Nancy? Lived in Paris always till the war. He’ll appreciate Ritz cooking at Riggs’ prices if anybody will.”

Nancy looked fixedly at the small side-table where the stranger had just placed himself as if he were etched upon the whiteness of the wall behind him. He sat erect and brooding,—his dark, rather melancholy eyes staring straight ahead, and a slight frown wrinkling his really fine forehead. He wore an Inverness cape slung over one shoulder.

“Looks like one of Rembrandt’s portraits of himself,” Caroline suggested.

“He looks like a brigand,” Betty said. “Nancy’s struck dumb with the privilege of adding fuel to a flame of genius like that. Wake up and eat your peach Melba, Nancy.”

Nancy started, and took perfunctorily the spoon that Molly was holding out to her, which she forgot to lift to her lips even after it was freighted with its first delicious mouthful.

“I dreamed about that man,” she said.