“Twenty-nine,” he said truthfully, with difficulty.
“I’m sure we’re going to be awful good friends,” remarked Miss Gardner quickly. “I’m so lonesome here, you know, a new place and all.” Being a stranger in a new place was hard, hard.
Nathan assured her he knew how she felt exactly. He would do his utmost to see that she was not lonely. He promised it. It really was his duty, as a resident and a matter of civic responsibility. Strangers must be graciously acclimated and made to feel at home. That was only ordinary hospitality.
“I’ve been living out in Ohio with my father,” said Miss Gardner. “But he married again and my stepmother was cruel to me. So I came east to stay with grandpa and grandma and enjoy life for a little time before I have to go back to it all again.” This sort of thing was also hard, hard.
Naturally, likewise as a resident and a taxpayer, Nathan was duly sympathetic. How could any one—male or female—be “cruel” to such a delicious little woman in red and gray? He tried to frame phrases appropriate to the sentiment but decided the time was not yet auspicious to give them utterance.
“You must come in,” declared the Gardner girl when they reached old Archie Cuttner’s house. “I’ll simply not take ‘No!’ I’m so deeply grateful to you for seeing me home so safely. Why!—I might have fallen and broken a limb!”
By her tone she made Nathan feel that he had done something akin to averting a national panic, or negotiating the peace of hemispheres. He went in.
Old Archibald Cuttner “had money”—at least enough to “let him potter ’round” after a lifetime of keeping the books in the Thorne Knitting Mills. He and his wife lived in the eastern half of a big double house at the far end of Walnut Street. Nathan had never met the Cuttners, but he felt agreeably—nay, graciously—disposed toward them. At least they were fellow Parisians in the responsibility of entertaining the stranger within the gates and they were also her relatives. He would cultivate the Cuttners. Why had it never occurred to him to do so before? Why, some day he might be intimately calling Old Archibald “Grandpop!” Stranger things had happened.
There was to be no cultivating of the Cuttners that night, however. Both had retired, leaving the oil center lamp burning and turned down low on the reading table.
Nathan followed the girl into the close, oil-scented sitting room furnished in mid-Victorian and with Larkin soap premiums. There was a horse-hair sofa, several chairs, hideous with handworked “tidies”, a sewing machine, a what-not, a mantel holding curios from the four corners of the earth—and Troy, N. Y.—and an upright piano of two-day installation.