It was Mrs. Spicer’s brag that she ran a homelike establishment. She said it really was more like one big happy family than a mere boarding house; to make it such was her constant aim, she said. But Tobe Daly said—behind her back, of course—that if this was home he knew now why so many girls left it. Tobe was always pulling some comical line.
This, being a Friday, was fish day with rice pudding to follow. Miss Clayton, having finished her rice pudding, was in the act of rising from her chair to go out and join this same Mr. Tobe Daly on the porch when Mrs. H. Spicer brought in a strange old gentleman. With the air which she always wore when presenting a fresh recruit to the other members of her constantly changing family groups—a kind of soothing yet a fluttering air—the landlady piloted him to the small table for four over in the far corner and presented him to the pair who still lingered at it—Miss Clayton and a Mrs. Scofield—and assigned him to the one vacant place there and told Katie, the second dining-room girl, to bring him some dinner.
Immediately there was something about the newcomer to catch the fancy and set the mind to work. There was more than a something, there was a great deal. It was not so much that he wore white whiskers and wore his white hair rather long. Hollywood is one spot where whiskers—a vast number of them—command favorable attention and have a money value. The reckless partisan who swore never to trim until William Jennings Bryan had been elected president comes into his belated own there. After all these long and cumbered years he has at last his place in the sun—as a benevolent uncle, or a veteran mining prospector, or the shaggy but kind-hearted keeper of the lighthouse on the coast where the little child drifts ashore in the storm, lashed to a mast, or the aged wanderer of the waste-lands who in Reel Three turns up and in Reel Six turns out to be the long-lost father of the heroine. Or what not.
So it was not this new boarder’s whiskers and his long hair which centered the collective eye of the dining-room so much as it was his tall, slim, almost straight old figure, his ruddy and distinguished but rather vacuous face, his high white collar and black string tie, his black frock coat with the three upper buttons of the waistcoat unfastened so that the genteel white pleated shirt bosom ballooned out of the vent, his slim “low quarter” shoes. More than these it was his bearing, so courtly, which meant so old-fashioned, and most of all it was the sweeping low salute he rendered to Mrs. Scofield and to Miss Clayton before he sat down and drew up. It was as though he said: “As examples of fair womanhood I render tribute to you both. Through you I honor all the gracious sex of which you two are such shining ornaments.”
You almost could hear him saying it; your imagination told you this was precisely the sort of high-flown, hifalutin language he would use, and use it naturally, too. For here was a type come to life, a character bit in the flesh. And that’s a rare bird to find even in Hollywood where types do so freely abound.
He asked Miss Clayton a question or two, and she made hurried and, one might have thought, confused answers before she escaped to the veranda where Tobe Daly, that canny squire of dames, was holding space for her alongside him on the top step.
“Gee,” began Tobe, “did you make it?”
“Make what?” she asked, settling and smoothing her skirts.
“The old pappy guy, who else?”
“He’s nice,” said Miss Clayton, still engaged in the business of drawing the skirt down over her knees.