He sat beside her for an unhappy hour while a famous screen comedian did the things with his feet and his backbone for which his managers paid him more in one year than the United States pays its Presidents in ten. At each impossible climax Nancy shrieked with laughter, the loud, delighted laughter of a pleased child. Her enthusiasm for the slapstick artist provoked him, but at the same time that gay laughter tickled his ears pleasantly. There's plenty of good in a girl who can laugh like that! After the grimacing genius there followed a short drama of stage mother-love, in which the angel-child dies strenuously in his little white bed. Nancy dabbled her eyes, and blew her nose with what her captious companion thought unnecessary vigor.
"Ain't it movin'?"
"Yes. Moving pictures," was the cold response. And to himself he was saying, defiantly: "Well, what else could I expect? She's not a whit worse than the vast majority! She's got the herd-taste. That's perfectly natural, under the circumstances. When I get her well in hand, she will be different."
"You don't like funny things, an' you got no feelin' for sad things," she ruminated, as they left the theater. In silence they walked back to their hotel.
The bulk of her purchases had been sent from the store, and a huge parcel awaited her in her room. It enchanted her to go over these new possessions, to gloat over her new toilet articles, to sniff at the leather of her traveling-kit. The smell of new leather was always to linger subconsciously in Nancy's memory; it was the smell of adventure and of change.
They dined together in Mr. Champney's sitting-room, although she would have preferred the public dining-room. Mr. Champneys was an abstemious man, but the girl was frankly greedy with the naïve greed of one who had been heretofore stinted. She had seldom had what she really craved, and at best she had never had enough of it. To be allowed to order what and as much as she pleased, to be served first, to have her wishes consulted at all, was a new, amazing, and altogether delightful experience. Everything was brand-new to her.
She had never before traveled in a sleeping-car. It delighted her to watch the deft porter make up the berths; she decided that the peculiar etiquette of sleeping-cars required that all travelers, male and female, should be driven to bed by lordly colored men in white jackets, and there left in cramped misery with nothing but an uncertain, rustling curtain between them and the world; this, too, at an hour when nobody is sleepy. Nancy wondered to see free white citizens meekly obey their dusky tyrant. She got into her own lower berth, grateful that she hadn't to climb like a cat into an upper.
She lay there staring, while the train whizzed through the night. This had been the most momentous day of her life. That morning she had been the hopeless slavey in the Baxter kitchen, an unpaid drudge with her hand against every man and every man's hand against her. She had been bullied and beaten, she had eaten leavings, and worn cast-offs. Since her mother's death she had known the life of an uncared-for child, the minimum of care measured against the maximum of labor squeezed out of it. Until to-day her fate had been the fate of those who approach the table of Life with unshod feet and unwashen hands.
And to-night all that was changed. She was here, flying farther and farther away from all she had known. She wondered if she were not dreaming it. Panicky at that, she sat up in her berth, pressed the button that turned on the electric light, slipped her new kimono about her, and looked long and earnestly at the new clothes within reach of her hand. There they were, real to her touch; there was her fine new hand-bag; and most real of all was the feel of the money in it. Nancy fingered the money, thoughtfully smoothing out the bills. "As soon as we are settled, you will have your allowance, and I shall of course provide you with a check-book," Mr. Champneys had told her. "In the meanwhile you will naturally want money for such little things as you may need." And he had given her twenty five-dollar bills. She had received the money dumbly. This had been the crowning miracle—for she had never in the whole course of her life had so much as one five-dollar bill to do as she pleased with. She sat looking at the money, concrete proof of the reality of the change that had befallen her, and wondered, and wondered. With a sigh of content she thrust the hand-bag under her pillow, folded her kimono at the foot of her berth, switched out the light, and presently fell asleep.
In his berth opposite hers, Mr. Chadwick Champneys, more sleepless even than Nancy, was tabulating his estimate of the young woman he had acquired. It ran something like this: