XIII
"Pass the relish, please!"
It was Miss Hultz who spoke. Attired in a smart spring poplin, indisputably chic exquis as advertised, the lady from Bimberg's flashed all her handsome front teeth in a smile directed across the napery of Mrs. Tilney's dinner table. Varick, plunged in a reverie, awoke abruptly.
"I beg pardon?" he inquired.
"The relish," repeated Miss Hultz.
Like others at the boarding house, the lady had of late begun to regard Varick with a new interest, a feeling of sympathy tinged deeply with regret. It was as if something in his aspect had aroused this, and that her heartstrings, touched by it, twanged in a responsive chord:
Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
Not that Varick was either wan or pale, or that fortune had failed to smile on him. On the contrary, at the bank he recently had been promoted, his pay doubled as well. But Miss Hultz had her suspicions of what was in the air; and with her little finger elegantly extended, her manner nice, she was pronging into the relish jar when again she spoke. The pickles, it appeared, had been merely a pretext, a preface.
"Seen the piece in the paper, Mr. Varick?" Varick said no, he hadn't read the evening paper; and hearing this Miss Hultz, her air now arch, impaled a pearly onion on her fork. The piece, she said, was in the society column; and she added: "It's all about a little friend of yours, Mr. V."
In brief it was an account of Bab's dance that absorbed Miss Hultz. Tonight was the night it was to be given.