“He’s nice,” she said, as though to herself. “I’ll bet anything he’s awfully nice.”
“Who? Oh, you mean old Uncle Whiskers. Forget him—think about me a spell. Why not be reasonable now, like I was just now saying?” He scrooged in closer.
She edged away, keeping distance between them. Mr. Daly caught a flash of her quick grimace. From wheedling, his tone changed to a rasping one of rising temper. “Maybe he’s nice,” he said, “but even so I noticed you sort of run out on him a while ago.” He let a little grit of satire sift into the next sentence: “What’s the matter—don’t you real Southerners like to get together when you get a chance and hold hands and sing Dixie Land? Or is it you was scared of something?”
“Say, look her-r-r-e, you lay off that stuff.” If the truth must be known Miss Clayton was a child of Pittsburgh. And in Pittsburgh to r-r-r is human, to forgive almost impossible—if you’re a purist in the matter of phonetics. And in moments of stress this native was prone to forget things which laboriously she had learned, and revert to the native idioms.
“Well, then, all I got to say is that if you’re Southern I’m a Swede watchmaker.” He shrugged, then got on his legs. “Say, little one, if you want to get huffy and act standoffish I’m pretty well up on the huff stuff myself. But stick around here awhile longer and you’ll see how far a head of taffy hair and a doll-baby face will get you without you got somebody on the inside of one of the big plants to plug your game.” Young Mr. Daly, camera-man by profession and skirt-chaser on the side, tipped his hat brim the fractional part of an inch. “So long; and think it over.”
The dusk gathering under the pepper trees along the sidewalk absorbed his runty but swaggering shape. Left alone, Miss Clayton put her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fisted hands and thought it over. She took stock of herself and her prospects, social and artistic, also financial. On the whole she didn’t have such a very cheerful evening sitting there all by herself.
It was next morning when the California pathways of those two Southerners—the seventy-nine-year-old regular and the twenty-year-old volunteer—really met and joined. It started at the breakfast table, which they had now to themselves. The disgruntled Mr. Daly had come down earlier. Mrs. Scofield would come down later. Between engagements in small mother rôles—not necessarily small mothers but nearly always small rôles—she was resting, which is a professional term signifying restlessness.
Captain Teal had eaten his prunes—Native Sons, Tobe would have called them—and was waiting for his bacon with an egg, when Miss Clayton entered. At sight of her he instantly was on his feet, much to the surprise of Katie, the other dining-room girl, who thought she knew boarding-house manners but was always willing to learn something; and he made a featly bow of greeting in which the paternal was blended with a court chamberlain’s best flourish, and drew out Miss Clayton’s chair for her. Katie perceived that the old gentleman was not welcoming his fellow lodger to a place at Mrs. H. Spicer’s board so much as he seemed to be welcoming her to his own. For the moment, he was the entertainer, Miss Clayton his honored guest. There was a trick about it, someway.
He waited in a silence which throbbed with the pulse of a considerate gallantry until the lady had stated her wishes to Katie, she choosing the apple sauce in preference to the prunes. Then he took up at the point where he had left off on the interruption of her flight the evening before.