"I"ve no word to say," Nancy said, "but how do you do? I"ve just dined elsewhere. I only stopped in here for a moment to get something--something I left here at lunch."
"In that case I"ll offer you a drop of Michael"s tea in my water gla.s.s." He poured a tablespoonful or so of claret from the teapot into the gla.s.s of ice-water before him, and added several lumps of sugar to the concoction, which he stirred gravely for some time before he offered it to her. "I never touch water myself. This is _eau rougie_ as the French children drink it. It"s really better for you than ice-cream and a gla.s.s of water."
"And less American," Nancy murmured with her eyes down.
"And less American," he acquiesced blandly.
Nancy sipped her drink, and Collier Pratt stirred the dregs in his coffee cup--Nancy had overheard some of her patrons remarking on the curious habits of a man who consumed a pot of tea and a pot of coffee at one and the same meal--and they regarded each other for some time in silence. Michael and Hildeguard, Molly and Dolly and two others of the staff of girls were grouped in the doorway exactly in Nancy"s range of vision, and whispering to one another excitedly concerning the phenomenon that met their eyes.
"The little girl?" Nancy said, trying to ignore the composite scrutiny to which she was being subjected, by turning determinedly to her companion, "the little girl that you spoke of--is she well?"
"She"s as well as a motherless baby could be, subjected to the irregularities of a life like mine. Still she seems to thrive on it."
"Is she yours?" Nancy asked.
"Yes, she"s mine," Collier Pratt said, gravely dismissing the subject, and leaving Nancy half ashamed of her boldness in putting the question, half possessed of a madness to know the answer at any cost.
"I"ve discovered something very interesting," Collier Pratt said, after an interval in which Nancy felt that he was perfectly cognizant of her struggle with her curiosity; "in fact, it"s one of the most interesting discoveries that I have made in the course of a not unadventurous life. Do you come to this restaurant often?"
"Quite often," Nancy equivocated, "earlier in the day. For luncheon and for tea."
"I come here almost every night of my life," Collier Pratt declared, "and I intend to continue to come so long as _le bon Dieu_ spares me my health and my epicurean taste. You know that I spoke of the food here before. The character of it has changed entirely. It"s unmistakably French now, not to say Parisian. Outside of Paris or Vienna I have never tasted such soups, such sauce, such delicate and suggestive flavors. My entire existence has been revolutionized by the experience. I am no longer the lonely and unhappy man you discovered at this gate a short month ago. I can not cavil at an America that furnishes me with such food as I get in this place.
"Man may live without friends, and may live without books.
But civilized man can not live without cooks,"
Nancy quoted sententiously.
"Exactly. The whole point is that the cooking here is civilized. Oh!
you ought to come here to dinner, my friend. I don"t know what the luncheons and teas are like--"
"They"re very good," Nancy said.
"But not like the dinners, I"ll wager. The dinners are the very last word! I don"t know why this place isn"t famous. Of course, I do my best to keep it a secret from the artistic rabble I know. It would be overrun with them in a week, and its character utterly ruined."
"I wonder if it would."
"Oh! I"m sure of it."
"What is your discovery?" Nancy asked.
Collier Pratt leaned dramatically closer to her, and Nancy instinctively bent forward across the tiny table until her face was very near to his.
"Do you know anything about the price of foodstuffs?" he demanded.
"A little," Nancy admitted.
"You know then that the price of every commodity has soared unthinkably high, that the mere problem of providing the ordinary commonplace meal at the ordinary commonplace restaurant has become almost unsolvable to the proprietors? Most of the eating places in New York are run at a loss, while the management is marking time and praying for a change in conditions. Well, here we have a restaurant opening at the most crucial period in the history of such enterprises, offering its patrons the delicacies of the season most exquisitely cooked, at what is practically the minimum price for a respectable meal."
"That"s true, isn"t it?"
"More than that, there are people who come here, who order one thing and get another, and the thing they get is always a much more elaborate and extravagant dish than the one they asked for. I"ve seen that happen again and again."
"Have you?" Nancy asked faintly, shrinking a little beneath the intentness of his look. "How--how do you account for it?"
"There"s only one way to account for it."
"Do you think that there is an--an unlimited amount of capital behind it?"
"I think that goes without saying," he said; "there must be an unlimited amount of capital behind it, or it wouldn"t continue to flourish like a green bay tree; but that"s not in the nature of a discovery. Anybody with any power of observation at all would have come to that conclusion long since."
"Then, what is it you have found out?" Nancy asked, quaking.
"My discovery is--" Collier Pratt paused for the whole effect of his revelation to penetrate to her consciousness, "that this whole outfit is run _philanthropically_."
"Philanthropically?"
"Don"t you see? There can"t be any other explanation of it. It"s an eleemosynary inst.i.tution. That"s what it is."
Nancy met his expectant eyes with a trifle of wildness in her own, but he continued to hold her gaze triumphantly.
"Don"t you see," he repeated, "doesn"t everything point to that as the only possible explanation? It"s some rich woman"s plaything. That accounts for the food, the setting,--everything in fact that has puzzled us. Amateur,--that"s the word; effective, delightful but inexperienced. It sticks out all over the place."
"The food isn"t amateur," Nancy said, a little resentfully.
"Nothing is amateur but the spirit behind it, through which we profit.
Don"t you see?"
"I"m beginning to see," Nancy admitted, "perhaps you are right. I guess the place is run philanthropically. I--I hadn"t quite realized it before."
"What did you think?"
"I knew that the--one who was running it wasn"t quite sure where she was coming out, but I didn"t think of it is an eleemosynary inst.i.tution."
"Of course, it is."
"It"s an unscrupulous sort of charity, then," Nancy mused, "if it"s masquerading as self-respecting and self-supporting. I--I"ve never approved of things like that."
"Why quarrel with a scheme so beneficent?"
"Don"t you care?" Nancy asked with a catch in her voice that was very like an appeal.
He shook his head.
"Why should I?" he smiled.
"Then I don"t care, either," she decided with an emphasis that was entirely lost on the man on the other side of the table.