Part 3 (1/2)
”I know what I really like in a woman,” d.i.c.k 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.
”I wonder sometimes if Nancy's got it in her really to care for a man,” Betty argued; ”she's as fond as she can be of d.i.c.k, but she'd sacrifice him heart, soul and body for that restaurant of hers. She's a perfect darling, I don't mean that; she's the very essence of sweetness and kindness, but she doesn't seem to understand or appreciate the possibilities of a devotion like d.i.c.k's. Do you think she's really capable of loving anybody--of putting any man in the world before all her ideas and notions and experiments?”
”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.
CHAPTER III
INAUGURATION
Nancy's heart was beating heavily when she woke on the memorable morning of the day that was to inaugurate the activities of Outside Inn. A confused dream of her Uncle Elijah in tatters on a park bench, which was instantly metamorphosed into one of the rustic seats she had arranged against the wall along the side of some of the bigger tables in the marble worker's court, was ostensibly the cause of the disturbance in her cardiac region. She had, it seemed, in the interminable tangle of nightmare, given Molly and Dolly and the Alma Tadema girl instructions to throw out the unwelcome guest, and she was standing by with Michael, who was a.s.suring her that the big blonde was ”certain a grand bouncer,” when she was smitten with a sickening dream-panic at her own ingrat.i.tude. ”He has given me everything he had in the world, poor old man,” she said to herself, and approached him remorsefully; but when she looked at him again she saw that he had the face and figure of a young stranger, and that the garments that had seemed to her to be streaming and unsightly rags, were merely the picturesque habiliments of a young artist, apparently newly translated from the Boulevard Montparna.s.se. At the sight of the stranger a heart-sinking terror seemed to take possession of her, and so, quaking and quavering in mortal intimidation,--she woke up.
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 s.h.i.+nes.”
Nancy lived in a little apartment of her own in that hinterland of what is now down-town New York, between the Rialto and its more conventional prototype, Society,--that is, she lived east of Broadway on a cross-street in the forties. The maid who took care of her had been in her aunt's employ for years, and had seen Nancy grow from her rather spoiled babyhood to a hoydenish childhood, and so on to soft-eyed, vibrant maturity. She was the only person who tyrannized over Nancy. She brought her a cup of steaming hot water with a pinch of soda in it, now.
”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.”
”There's a good deal in what you say, Hitty. If I had time I would go into the matter with you, but this is my busy day.” Nancy sat up in bed, and began sipping her hot water obediently. She looked very childlike in her straight cut, embroidered night-gown, with a long chestnut pig-tail over either shoulder. ”I feel as if I were going to be married, or--or something. I'm so excited.”
”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 nouris.h.i.+ng food to hordes of hungry men and women than making baby clothes for one hypothetical baby?”
”I dunno about the hypothetical part,” Hitty said, folding back the counterpane, inexorably. ”What I do know is that a girl that's getting to be an old girl--like you--past twenty-five--ought to be bestirring herself to look for a life pardner if she don't see any hanging around that suits her, instead of opening up a hotel for a pa.s.sel of perfect strangers. If ever I saw a woman spoiling for something of her own to fuss over--”
”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.”
Nancy spent a long day directing, planning, and arranging for the great event of the evening, the first dinner served to the public at Outside Inn.
From the bas.e.m.e.nt kitchen to the ground-floor serving-room in the rear, s.p.a.ce 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 ca.s.seroles 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 s.p.a.ce.
Presiding over the hooded ranges, two of gas and one coal for toasting and broiling, there was to be a huge Franco-American man-cook, discovered in one of the Fifth Avenue pastry shops in the course of Nancy's indefatigable tours of exploration, who was the son of a French _chef_ and a Virginian mother, and could express himself in the culinary art of either his father's or his mother's nativity. His staff of helpers and dishwashers had been chosen by himself, with what Nancy considered most felicitous results, while her own galaxy of waitresses, who operated the service kitchen up-stairs, proved themselves to a woman almost unbelievably superior and efficient.
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. d.i.c.k 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.