"Not to mention Nixie; dogs are so dear," said Bab, with a slight, naughty emphasis on "dogs."
Tom and Nixie departed, followed by praise from all the Wyndhams. Fifteen minutes later a gong sounded through the house, and Mrs. Wyndham and the girls made their long descent into the basement.
Two tables ran the full length of the dining-room, at the first of which the newcomers took their places. A severe old lady, presented to them as Mrs. Hardy, sat at its head, beside Mrs. Wyndham. She demanded—and so received—more attention than any one else in the house; her favorite theme was her past splendors and the dignity of her acquaintances. Opposite Mrs. Wyndham sat a big, kindly-looking man, who said he was "just in" from a Western trip, thus revealing himself a traveling salesman. He was pathetically fond of his two overgrown, ill-mannered children, and deprecating toward his peevish wife, who, with the elegance brought from her early apprenticeship to a milliner, assumed superiority to her less pretentious husband, thus keeping him in wholesome abeyance and general readiness to endow her with ornaments.
Three over-dressed, painfully vivacious girls in a row completed the line opposite the Wyndhams, with a big man at the other end of the table, who combated with a sort of fury every proposition made by any one else. Beside him sat a widow who was a bookkeeper in a department store, and who looked utterly worn out and anemic. Two school-teachers, middle-aged and drab of complexion, with the aggressive air of women who had from girlhood fought the world to maintain a foothold in it, filled in the line between the wilted widow and Jessamy.
The girls were too young to realize all that these melancholy types stood for, but their poor mother felt, with utter heartsickness, that this was the fate of those whom poverty made homeless and forced to struggle for existence.
The second table was filled with men of varying degrees of youth, solitary and unattached, some of whom lived under the roof, but the majority came in from outside for meals only, thus belonging to the class designated as "table boarders."
This table almost to a man stared at Mrs. Wyndham and her three charges, especially at Jessamy. Tom Leighton sat there, and Phyllis, who was quickest of the three to seize a situation, saw him flush with annoyance, and guessed that they, and particularly Jessamy's beauty, were the subject of impertinent comment.
Bab was half amused and wholly excited by the new experience; there was something she liked in rubbing elbows with such a singular world. But the sense of humor of all the others failed them, and they ate but lightly, pecking from the individual vegetable-dishes, which resembled birds' bath-tubs, with not much more appetite than the birds themselves would have had.
Jessamy heard a loud whisper asking for "a knockdown to the beauty" as she smiled and bowed to Tom Leighton in leaving the room, and Phyllis was stopped by the three resplendent maidens, who introduced themselves as May Daly, Fanny Harmon, and Daisy Heimberger. "You just come?" they asked—it seemed to Phyllis they all talked at once. "Say, ain't your sister handsome? My, I think she's simply great! Too bad the other one got cut so; must be her who fell up the steps yest'day when the young doc was goin' out. Mis' Black was tellin' us last night. Funny way to meet! Do you know any of the other young gentlemen? They're awful nice, but I s'pose we won't have any chance now you've come!" This with a giggle that showed doubt of her own prediction. "They take us girls to the theater real often Sat'day nights—not doc, though; do you know him?"
"Mrs. Wyndham's husband and his father were friends," said Phyllis, prudently. It was the first time in her short life it had occurred to her to explain her actions.