Burt rose and ascended a step or two.
"Oh, how are you, Ogden?" he said rather absently. George felt that he should have said more, and said it sooner and said it differently.
Cornelia passed a cushion down to Burt. "There; take that and be comfortable." She regarded him studiously. It was dark, but he was all there—the short, thick, yellow moustache, the virile chin lately shaved and powdered, the dense hair that rose in a level line from the top of his forehead. Cornelia would have seen all these things in darkness that was Egyptian. She felt her fingers working towards them.
Cornelia was dressed with a trim and subdued modishness. She had taken a good many cues from Mrs. Floyd, and she had not been above cultivating an intimacy with a girl who worked for the excessively dear and fashionable house that dressed Mrs. Ingles. Mrs. Floyd had had no need to teach Cornelia anything about grammar, but she had shown her, all unconsciously, the advantage of a regulated use of slang.
Her fingers, debarred by the cold conventions of society from any entanglement in the head of hair just before her, smoothed and patted the folds in her own skirt. She further relieved herself by a high, sniffling toss of the head and a long, deep respiration.
"Well, isn't this a great night!" she said, addressing the little party generally. "Isn't the air splendid! I declare, I could just ramble about till morning. And yet I suppose your mother"—to Abbie—"has checkmated herself and gone to bed. Dear me, if there wasn't any city, and no clatter-clatter on that machine! Seems as if I must just make a break for the country before long—just get up home and hop into my little boat and paddle all around that whole blessed lake!"
"Why don't you?" asked Ogden. "Can't you give yourself a vacation?" He spoke a little wistfully; there was none ahead for him—no Underground man ever had an outing during his first year.
"I don't see hour. They say you can't serve two masters. Well, I've got five—four too many. At least," she tacked on, as if a closer calculation would further increase the number of these superfluities. "Can I go all over the building and tell each one of them that my services are going to be demanded exclusively for several days by some other one of them? Or shall I he sick—just for a day, at first, and keep adding days, one at a time, until I've had a week? I don't know what to do."
"Drop the whole business," said Burt brusquely, without turning about.
"And leave all my poor people in the lurch?" she cried, as if her employers were her most poignant concern.