"I don't see but what this interesting theory lets you out altogether.

Why Outside Inn, with its foxy table d'hote, 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 all the 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 were under 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, "but I 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 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 subst.i.tution 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 ap.r.o.n.

"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 d.a.m.ned," 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 att.i.tude 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 quant.i.ty 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 a.s.sumption 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 direction of his salvation. This new att.i.tude 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'hote 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 subst.i.tution 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 the day. 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 quant.i.ties 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 good and 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 a.s.sembled guests with an authoritative and possessive air, adjusting and rearranging small details, and acknowledging the presence of _habitues_, 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. Collier Pratt made it his almost invariable habit to come sauntering toward the table in the corner, under the life-sized effigy of the _Venus 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s of ducks and segments of orange, with squab chicken stuffed with new corn, with _filets de sole a la Marguery_. Nancy craftily spurred him on to his most ambitious achievements under pretense of wishing her own appet.i.te 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 the _gourmet_ as be sampled Gaspard's sauce _verte_ or Hollandaise or lifted the gla.s.s cover from the mushrooms _sous cloche_ and inhaled their delicate aroma.

"I wonder if he finds our food very American in 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.

CHAPTER VI

AN ELEEMOSYNARY INSt.i.tUTION

One night during the latter part of July Betty had a birthday, and according to immemorial custom Caroline and Nancy and d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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 big gate 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."