“Your bath is drawed,” Hitty acknowledged sourly, “and your breakfast will be on the table in half an hour by the clock.”
“I suppose I must require that corrective New England influence,” Nancy said to herself, as she tried the temperature of her bath and found it frigid, “just as some people need acid in their diet. If my mother were alive, I wonder what she would have said to me this morning.”
Nancy spent a long day directing, planning, and arranging for the great event of the evening, 38 the first dinner served to the public at Outside Inn.
From the basement kitchen to the ground-floor serving-room in the rear, space cunningly coaxed from the reluctant marble worker, the mechanism of Nancy’s equipment was as perfect as lavish expenditure and scientific management could make it. The kitchen gleamed with copper and granite ware; huge pots for soup and vegetables, mammoth double boilers of white enamel,—Nancy was firm in her conviction that rice and cereal could be cooked in nothing but white enamel,—rows upon rows of shelves methodically set with containers and casseroles and odd-shaped metal serving-dishes, as well as the ubiquitous blue and rose-color chinaware presenting its gay surface from every available bit of space.
Presiding over the hooded ranges, two of gas and one coal for toasting and broiling, there was to be a huge Franco-American man-cook, discovered in one of the Fifth Avenue pastry shops in the course of Nancy’s indefatigable tours of exploration, who was the son of a French chef and a Virginian mother, and could express himself in the culinary art of either 39 his father’s or his mother’s nativity. His staff of helpers and dishwashers had been chosen by himself, with what Nancy considered most felicitous results, while her own galaxy of waitresses, who operated the service kitchen up-stairs, proved themselves to a woman almost unbelievably superior and efficient.
The courtyard itself was a brave spectacle in its final aspect of background for the detail and paraphernalia of polite dining. The more unself-conscious of the statues, the nymphs and nereids and Venuses, she managed either to relegate to the storehouse within, or to add a few cunningly draped vines to the nonchalance of their effect, while the gargoyles and Roman columns and some of the least ambitious of the fountain-models she was able to adapt delightfully to her outrageous ideal of arrangement. Dick had denuded several smart florist shops to furnish her with field flowers enough to develop her decorative scheme, which included strangely the stringing of half a dozen huge Chinese lanterns that even in the daylight took on a meteoric light and glow.
The night was clear and soft, and Fifth Avenue, ingratiatingly swept and garnished, 40 stretched its wake of summer allure before the never unappreciative eyes of Billy and Caroline, and Betty and Dick respectively, who had met at the Waldorf by appointment, and were now making their way, thus ceremoniously and in company, to the formal opening dinner of Nancy’s Inn.
Two nondescript Pagan gentlemen of Titanesque proportions had joined the watch of the conventional leonine twins, and the big gate now stood hospitably open, over it swinging the new sign in gallant crimson and white, that announced to all the world that Outside Inn was even at that moment, at its most punctilious service.
Molly and Dolly, in the prescribed blue chambray, their cheeks several shades pinker than their embellishment of pink ribbon, and panting with ill-suppressed excitement, rushed forward to greet the four and ushered them solemnly to their places,—the gala table in the center of the court, set with a profusion of fleur de lis, with pink ribbon trainers. Thanks to Dick’s carefully manipulated advertising campaign and personal efforts among his friends and business associates, they were 41 not by any means the first arrivals. Half a dozen laughing groups were distributed about the round tables in the center space, while several tête-à-tête couples were confidentially ensconced in corners and at cozy tables for two, craftily sheltered by some of the most imposing of the marble figures and columns.
“It seems like a real restaurant,” Caroline said wonderingly.