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 a room,” 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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

“Oh! is it 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.

“Why, of course, is it a woman?”

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

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

“He wouldn’t in 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.

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

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 the look of a thing, that’s something different again.”

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

“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.

“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’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.”

“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.

“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.”

“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.

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 of le 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.

“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.”

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 never have worn it before,” she said, answering Dick’s question.

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.

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

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

“You can’t eat it and grow thin.”

“You can’t eat it and grow fat unless 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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 in vers libre if 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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

“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 is eau rougie as 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.

“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.”

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.

“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.

“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.

“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?”

“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.