“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 35 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 36 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 37 a passel 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?”