“I know what I really like in a woman,” Dick 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 Dick, 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 32 devotion like Dick’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 assuring her that the big blonde was “certain a grand bouncer,” when she was smitten with a sickening dream-panic at her own ingratitude. “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 34 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 Montparnasse. 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.