“Somebody is irrigating his melons.” Mrs. Hardin’s observation was a trifle absent. She liked the attention they were attracting. How she would love to be in a position where she could use her social talents!
Mrs. Youngberg was reining up in front of the Desert Hotel. Half a dozen men jumped forward to tie the mare, and to help the ladies with their bundles. Gerty declared she would not let them carry the packages; she would send the boy after them. She felt the importance of a leader of society.
“You don’t mind if I do a few errands first,” called Mrs. Youngberg after her. Gerty whirled, her cheeks red, her eyes seeing not Mrs. Youngberg but a vision of the kitchen at home; the unpeeled grapes, the candle-shades, the waiting name-cards.
“Why, I thought you were going to help me,” she cried, her consternation shrilling her voice.
“I shall be right back,” reassured her friend. “You may rely on me. Mr. Youngberg could not come in this morning; he gave me a list a yard long. And I must see Mrs. Blinn about the Improvement Club; it can’t be put off. I’m not going to fail you. You may rely on me.”
It was really too provoking. The whole morning had gone wrong. Mrs. Hardin marched into the hotel, her color high. She might have guessed that Mrs. Youngberg would fall down; she always did. She should have relied on some one else, that homely Towne girl who is always so good-natured!
Already ruffled, she found everything to be exasperating in the Desert Hotel. She had taken it for granted when Patton had promised her the use of the dining-room weeks before that she could arrange the table as she would use it at eleven. He upset all her plans by telling her he needed the space; he had not intended to give her that impression. She had said, he reminded her, that she needed the room for an eleven o’clock supper.
She was convinced that she detected a difference in his manner to her. “He would never have treated me so last year. We are nobodies, now!”
The very best he could do, Mr. Patton assured her, was to let her arrange the table in the drummers’ sample room whence it could be carried “all set” into the dining-room after it was properly cleared. “I have to consider my girls,” he said. “If I ask them to do anything extra, they would throw the whole waitresses’ union in my face.”
“Give me a soda lemonade, Mr. Patton,” ordered Gerty, moving to the white and silver counter. “I’ll think it over.”