"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 shines."

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 nourishing 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.

The night was clear and soft, and Fifth Avenue, ingratiatingly swept and garnished, stretched its wake of summer allure before the never unappreciative eyes of Billy and Caroline, and Betty and d.i.c.k respectively, who had met at the Waldorf by appointment, and were now making their way, thus ceremoniously and in company, to the formal opening dinner of Nancy's Inn.

Two nondescript Pagan gentlemen of t.i.tanesque 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.

Molly and Dolly, in the prescribed blue chambray, their cheeks several shades pinker than their embellishment of pink ribbon, and panting with ill-suppressed excitement, rushed forward to greet the four and ushered them solemnly to their places,--the gala table in the center of the court, set with a profusion of fleur de lis, with pink ribbon trainers. Thanks to d.i.c.k's carefully manipulated advertising campaign and personal efforts among his friends and business a.s.sociates, they were not by any means the first arrivals. Half a dozen laughing groups were distributed about the round tables in the center s.p.a.ce, while several tete-a-tete couples were confidentially ensconced in corners and at cozy tables for two, craftily sheltered by some of the most imposing of the marble figures and columns.

"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?"

"I was regretting your uncomfortable moments, Caroline," Billy said, "and wishing it were in my power to do away with them, but it isn't. I was also musing sadly, but quite irrelevantly, on the tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive."

"Are you deceiving Caroline in some way?" d.i.c.k 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 superst.i.tious about. Pipe the dame at the corner table with the lorgnette. Cla.s.sy, isn't she?"

"Friend of my aunt's," d.i.c.k said, acknowledging the lady's salute.

"And the Belasco adventuress in the corner."

"My stenographer," d.i.c.k explained, bowing again.

"I've got a bunch of men coming," Billy said; "if they put the place on the b.u.m you've got to help me bounce them, d.i.c.k."

"Up-stairs in the service kitchen," Betty was explaining to Caroline, "they keep all the dishes that don't have to be heated for serving, also the silver and daily linen supply. When we seat ourselves at a table like this, the waitress to whom it is a.s.signed goes in and gets a basket of bread--I think it's a pretty idea to serve the bread in baskets, don't you?--and whatever silver is necessary, and a bottle of water. When she places those things she asks us what our choice of a meat course is,--there is a choice except on chicken night--and gives that order in the kitchen when she goes to get our soup."

"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?" d.i.c.k asked.

"Michael calls him the Haythan Shinee. He is rather a _glossy_ man, you know, and he says when the time comes for him, Michael, to dress like a street cleaner and pilot a gravy boat, he'll let us know."

"Respect for his superiors is not one of Michael's most salient characteristics," d.i.c.k 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--"