Peter nodded wisely when Beulah, cured by these summary though obsolete methods, told the story in full detail. Gertrude had laughed until the invalid had enveloped herself in the last few shreds of her dignity and ordered her out of the room, and the others had been scarcely more sympathetic.

"I know that it's funny, Peter," she said, "but you see, I can't help worrying about it just the same. Of course, as soon as I was up she was just as respectful and obedient to my slightest wish as she ever was, but at the time, when she was lording it over me so, she--she actually slapped me. You never saw such a--blazingly determined little creature."

Peter smiled,--gently, as was Peter's way when any friend of his made an appeal to him.

"That's all right, Beulah," he said, "don't you let it disturb you for an instant. This manifestation had nothing to do with our experiment.

Our experiment is working fine--better than I dreamed it would ever work. What happened to Eleanor, you know, was simply this. Some of the conditions of her experience were recreated suddenly, and she reverted."

CHAPTER VI

JIMMIE BECOMES A PARENT

The entrance into the dining-room of the curly headed young man and his pretty little niece, who had a suite on the eighth floor, as the room clerk informed all inquirers, was always a matter of interest to the residents of the Hotel Winchester. They were an extremely picturesque pair to the eye seeking for romance and color. The child had the pure, clear cut features of the cameo type of New England maidenhood. She was always dressed in some striking combination of blue, deep blue like her eyes, with blue hair ribbons. Her good-looking young relative, with hair almost as near the color of the sun as her own, seemed to be entirely devoted to her, which, considering the charm of the child and the radiant and magnetic spirit of the young man himself, was a delightfully natural manifestation.

But one morning near the close of the second week of their stay, the usual radiation of resilient youth was conspicuously absent from the young man's demeanor, and the child's face reflected the gloom that sat so incongruously on the contour of an optimist. The little girl fumbled her menu card, but the waitress--the usual aging pedagogic type of the small residential hotel--stood unnoticed at the young man's elbow for some minutes before he was sufficiently aroused from his gloomy meditations to address her. When he turned to her at last, however, it was with the grin that she had grown to a.s.sociate with him,--the grin, the absence of which had kept her waiting behind his chair with a patience that she was, except in a case where her affections were involved, entirely incapable of. Jimmie's protestations of inability to make headway with the ladies were not entirely sincere.

"Bring me everything on the menu," he said, with a wave of his hand in the direction of that painstaking pasteboard. "Coffee, tea, fruit, marmalade, breakfast food, ham and eggs. Bring my niece here the same.

That's all." With another wave of the hand he dismissed her.

"You can't eat it all, Uncle Jimmie," Eleanor protested.

"I'll make a bet with you," Jimmie declared. "I'll bet you a dollar to a doughnut that if she brings it all, I'll eat it."

"Oh! Uncle Jimmie, you know she won't bring it. You never bet so I can get the dollar,--you never do."

"I never bet so I can get my doughnut, if it comes to that."

"I don't know where to buy any doughnuts," Eleanor said; "besides, Uncle Jimmie, I don't really consider that I owe them. I never really say that I'm betting, and you tell me I've lost before I've made up my mind anything about it."

"Speaking of doughnuts," Jimmie said, his face still wearing the look of dejection under a grin worn awry, "can you cook, Eleanor? Can you roast a steak, and saute baked beans, and stew sausages, and fry out a breakfast m.u.f.fin? Does she look like a cook to you?" he suddenly demanded of the waitress, who was serving him, with an apologetic eye on the menu, the invariable toast-coffee-and-three-minute-egg breakfast that he had eaten every morning since his arrival.

The waitress smiled toothily. "She looks like a capable one," she p.r.o.nounced.

"I _can_ cook, Uncle Jimmie," Eleanor giggled, "but not the way you said. You don't roast steak, or--or--"

"Don't you?" Jimmie asked with the expression of pained surprise that never failed to make his ward wriggle with delight. There were links in the educational scheme that Jimmie forged better than any of the cooperative guardians. Not even Jimmie realized the value of the giggle as a developing factor in Eleanor's existence. He took three swallows of coffee and frowned into his cup. "I can make coffee," he added. "Good coffee. Well, we may as well look the facts in the face, Eleanor. The jig's up. We're moving away from this elegant hostelry to-morrow."

"Are we?" Eleanor asked.

"Yes, Kiddo. Apologies to Aunt Beulah (mustn't call you Kiddo) and the reason is, that I'm broke. I haven't got any money at all, Eleanor, and I don't know where I am going to get any. You see, it is this way.

I lost my job six weeks ago."

"But you go to work every morning, Uncle Jimmie?"

"I leave the house, that is. I go looking for work, but so far no nice juicy job has come rolling down into my lap. I haven't told you this before because,--well--when Aunt Beulah comes down every day to give you your lessons I wanted it to look all O. K. I thought if you didn't know, you couldn't forget sometime and tell her."

"I don't tattle tale," Eleanor said.

"I know you don't, Eleanor. It's only my doggone pride that makes me want to keep up the bluff, but you're a game kid,--you--know. I tried to get you switched off to one of the others till I could get on my feet, but--no, they just thought I had stage fright. I couldn't insist. It would be pretty humiliating to me to admit that I couldn't support one-sixth of a child that I'd given my solemn oath to be-parent."

"To--to what?"

"Be-parent, if it isn't a word, I invent it. It's awfully tough luck for you, and if you want me to I'll own up to the crowd that I can't swing you, but if you are willing to stick, why, we'll fix up some kind of a way to cut down expenses and bluff it out."

Eleanor considered the prospect. Jimmie watched her apparent hesitation with some dismay.

"Say the word," he declared, "and I'll tell 'em."

"Oh! I don't want you to tell 'em," Eleanor cried. "I was just thinking. If you could get me a place, you know, I could go out to work. You don't eat very much for a man, and I might get my meals thrown in--"

"Don't, Eleanor, don't," Jimmie agonized. "I've got a scheme for us all right. This--this embarra.s.sment is only temporary. The day will come when I can provide you with Pol Roge and diamonds. My father is rich, you know, but he swore to me that I couldn't support myself, and I swore to him that I could, and if I don't do it, I'm d.a.m.ned. I am really, and that isn't swearing."

"I know it isn't, when you mean it the way they say in the Bible."

"I don't want the crowd to know. I don't want Gertrude to know. She hasn't got much idea of me anyway. I'll get another job, if I can only hold out."

"I can go to work in a store," Eleanor cried. "I can be one of those little girls in black dresses that runs between counters."

"Do you want to break your poor Uncle James' heart, Eleanor,--do you?"

"No, Uncle Jimmie."

"Then listen to me. I've borrowed a studio, a large barnlike studio on Washington Square, suitably equipped with pots and pans and kettles.

Also, I am going to borrow the wherewithal to keep us going. It isn't a bad kind of place if anybody likes it. There's one d.i.n.ky little bedroom for you and a cot bed for me, choked in bagdad. If you could kind of engineer the cooking end of it, with me to do the dirty work, of course, I think we could be quite snug and cozy."

"I know we could, Uncle Jimmie," Eleanor said. "Will Uncle Peter come to see us just the same?"

It thus befell that on the fourteenth day of the third month of her residence in New York, Eleanor descended into Bohemia. Having no least suspicion of the real state of affairs--for Jimmie, like most apparently expansive people who are given to rattling nonsense, was actually very reticent about his own business--the other members of the s.e.xtette did not hesitate to show their chagrin and disapproval at the change in his manner of living.

"The Winchester was an ideal place for Eleanor," Beulah wailed. "It's deadly respectable and middle cla.s.s, but it was just the kind of atmosphere for her to accustom herself to. She was learning to manage herself so prettily. This morning when I went to the studio--I wanted to get the lessons over early, and take Eleanor to see that exhibition of Bavarian dolls at Kuhner's--I found her washing up a trail of dishes in that closet behind the screen--you've seen it, Gertrude?--like some poor little scullery maid. She said that Jimmie had made an omelet for breakfast. If he'd made fifty omelets there couldn't have been a greater a.s.sortment of dirty dishes and kettles."

Gertrude smiled.

"Jimmie made an omelet for me once for which he used two dozen eggs.

He kept breaking them until he found the yolks of a color to suit him.

He said pale yolks made poor omelets, so he threw all the pale ones away."

"I suppose that you sat by and let him," Beulah said. "You would let Jimmie do anything. You're as bad as Margaret is about David."

"Or as bad as you are about Peter."

"There we go, just like any silly, brainless girls, whose chief object in life is the--the other s.e.x," Beulah cried inconsistently. "Oh! I hate that kind of thing."

"So do I--in theory--" Gertrude answered, a little dreamily. "Where do Jimmie and Eleanor get the rest of their meals?"