"In the kitchen, Ma." Miss Lancaster went into the kitchen herself, and Susan went on with the table-setting. Before she had finished, a boarder or two, against the unwritten law of the house, had come downstairs. Mrs. Cortelyou, a thin little wisp of a widow, was in the rocker in the bay-window, Major Kinney, fifty, gray, dried-up, was on the horsehair sofa, watching the kitchen door over his paper. Georgia, having finished her telephoning, had come in to drop idly into her own chair, and play with her knives and forks. Miss Lydia Lord, a plain, brisk woman, her upper lip darkened with hair, her figure flat and square, like a boy"s, had come down for her sister"s tray, and was talking to Susan in the resolutely cheerful tone that Susan always found annoying, when she was tired.
"The Keiths are off for Europe again, Susan,--dear me! isn"t it lovely for the people who can do those things!" said Miss Lord, who was governess in a very wealthy household, and liked to talk of the city"s prominent families. "Some day you and I will have to find a million dollars and run away for a year in Italy! I wonder, Sue," the mild banter ceased, "if you could get Mary"s dinner? I hate to go into the kitchen, they"re all so busy--"
Susan took the tray, and went through the swinging door, and into the kitchen. Two or three forms were flitting about in the steam and smoke and flickering gas-light, water was running, gravy hissing on the stove; Alice, the one poor servant the establishment boasted, was attempting to lift a pile of hot plates with an insufficient cloth.
Susan filled her tray silently.
"Anything I can do, Mary Lou?"
"Just get out of the WAY, lovey--that"s about all--I salted that once, Ma. If you don"t want that table, Sue--and shut the door, dear! The smoke--"
Susan was glad to get out of the kitchen, and in a moment Mrs.
Lancaster and Mary Lou came into the dining-room, too, and Alice rang the dinner bell. Instantly the boarders streamed downstairs, found their places with a general murmuring of mild little pleasantries. Mrs.
Lancaster helped the soup rapidly from a large tureen, her worried eyes moved over the table-furnishings without pause.
The soup was well cooled before the place next to Susan was filled by a tall and muscular young man, with very blue eyes, and a large and exceptionally charming mouth. The youth had teeth of a dazzling whiteness, a smile that was a bewildering Irish compound of laughter and tears, and sooty blue-black hair that fitted his head like a thick cap. He was a noisy lad, this William Oliver, opinionated, excitable, a type that in its bigness and broadness seemed almost coa.r.s.e, sometimes, but he had all a big man"s tenderness and sweetness, and everyone liked him. Susan and he quarreled with and criticized each other, William imitating her little affectations of speech and manner, Susan reviling his transparent and absurd ambitions, but they had been good friends for years. Young Oliver"s mother had been Mrs. Lancaster"s housekeeper for the most prosperous period in the history of the house, and if Susan naturally felt that the son of a working housekeeper was seriously handicapped in a social sense, she nevertheless had many affectionate memories of his mother, as the kindly dignified "Nellie"
who used to amuse them so delightfully on rainy days. Nellie had been long dead, now, and her son had grown up into a vigorous, enthusiastic young person, burning his big hands with experiments in physics and chemistry, reading the Scientific American late into the night, until his broad shoulders were threatened with a permanent stoop, and his eager eyes blinked wearily at breakfast, anxious to disprove certain accepted theories, and as eager to introduce others, unaffected, irreverent, and irresistibly buoyant. William could not hear an opera praised without dragging Susan off to gallery seats, which the lady frankly characterized as "smelly," to see if his opinion agreed with that of the critics. If it did not, Susan must listen to long dissertations upon the degeneracy of modern music. His current pa.s.sion was the German language, which he was studying in odd moments so that he might translate certain scientific treatises in a manner more to the scientific mind.
"h.e.l.lo, Susan, darling!" he said now, as he slipped into his chair.
"h.e.l.lo, heart"s delight!" Susan answered composedly.
"Well, here--here--here!" said an aged gentleman who was known for no good reason as "Major," "what"s all this? You young folks going to give us a wedding?"
"Not unless I"m chloroformed first, Major," Susan said, briskly, and everybody laughed absently at the well-known pleasantry. They were all accustomed to the absurdity of the Major"s question, and far more absorbed just now in watching the roast, which had just come on.
Another pot-roast. Everybody sighed.
"This isn"t just what I meant to give you good people to-night," said Mrs. Lancaster cheerfully, as she stood up to carve, "but butchers can be tyrants, as we all know. Mary Lou, put vegetables on that for Mrs.
Cortelyou."
Mary Lou briskly served potatoes and creamed carrots and summer squash; Susan went down a pyramid of saucers as she emptied a large bowl of rather watery tomato-sauce.
"Well, they tell us meat isn"t good for us anyway!" piped Mrs. Kinney, who was rheumatic, and always had scrambled eggs for dinner.
"--ELEGANT chicken, capon, probably, and on Sundays, turkey all winter long!" a voice went on in the pause.
"My father ate meat three times a day, all his life," said Mrs. Parker, a dark, heavy woman, with an angelic-looking daughter of nineteen beside her, "and papa lived to be--let me see--"
"Ah, here"s Jinny!" Mrs. Lancaster stopped carving to receive the kiss of a tall, sweet-faced, eye-gla.s.sed young woman who came in, and took the chair next hers. "Your soup"s cold, dear," said she tenderly.
Miss Virginia Lancaster looked a little chilly; her eyes, always weak, were watery now from the sharp evening air, and her long nose red at the tip. She wore neat, plain clothes, and a small hat, and laid black lisle gloves and a small black book beside her plate as she sat down.
"Good evening, everybody!" said she, pleasantly. "Late comers mustn"t complain, Ma, dear. I met Mrs. Curry, poor thing, coming out of the League rooms, and time flew, as time has a way of doing! She was telling me about Harry," Miss Virginia sighed, peppering her soup slowly. "He knew he was going," she resumed, "and he left all his little things--"
"Gracious! A child of seven?" Mrs. Parker said.
"Oh, yes! She said there was no doubt of it."
The conversation turned upon death, and the last acts of the dying.
Loretta Parker related the death of a young saint. Miss Lord, pouring a little lime water into most of her food, chewed religiously, her eyes moving from one speaker"s face to another.
"I saw my pearl to-day," said William Oliver to Susan, under cover of the general conversation.
"Eleanor Harkness? Where?"
"On Market Street,--the little darling! Walking with Anna Carroll.
Going to the boat."
"Oh, and how"s Anna?"
"Fine, I guess. I only spoke to them for a minute. I wish you could have seen her dear little laugh--"
"Oh, Billy, you fatuous idiot! It"ll be someone else to-morrow."
"It will NOT," said William, without conviction "No, my little treasure has all my heart--"
"Honestly," said Susan, in fine scorn, "it"s cat-sickening to hear you go on that way! Especially with that snapshot of Anna Carroll still in your watch!"
"That snapshot doesn"t happen to be still in my watch, if it"s any business of yours!" the gentleman said, sweetly.
"Why, it is TOO! Let"s see it, then!"
"No, I won"t let you see it, but it"s not there, just the same."
"Oh, Billy, what an awful lie!"
"Susan!" said Mrs. Lancaster, partly in reproof, partly to call her niece"s attention to apple-pie and tapioca pudding.
"Pudding, please, auntie." Susan subsided, not to break forth again until the events of the day suddenly rushed into her mind. She hastily reviewed them for William"s benefit.
"Well, what do you care?" he consoled her for the disappointment, "here"s your chance to bone up on the segregating, or crediting, or whatever you call it."
"Yes, and then have someone else get it!"
"No one else could get it, if you understood it best!" he said impatiently.
"That shows just about how much you know about the office!" Susan retorted, vexed at his lack of sympathy. And she returned to her pudding, with the real cream of the day"s news yet untold.
A few moments later Billy was excused, for a struggle with German in the night school, and departed with a joyous, "Auf wiedersehen, Fraulein Brown!" to Susan. Such boarders as desired were now drinking their choice between two dark, cool fluids that might have been tea, or might have been coffee, or might have been neither.
"I am going a little ahead of you and Georgie, Ma," said Virginia, rising, "for I want to see Mamie Evans about tickets for Sat.u.r.day."
"Say, listen, Jin, I"m not going to-night," said Miss Georgie, hastily, and with a little effort.
"Why, you said you were, Georgie!" the older sister said reproachfully.
"I thought you"d bring Ma."
"Well, I"m not, so you thought wrong!" Georgie responded airily.