Outside Inn. Ethel M. Kelley
through all that. If I had thought I would have been a better person with a great deal of money at my disposal, I—I might have—”
“Married Dick,” Billy finished for her. “I forgot that interesting possibility. I suppose to a girl who has just turned down a cold five millions, this meager little proposition”—he flourished the crumpled document in his hand—“has no real allure. Lord! What a world this is. You’ll marry Dick yet. Them as has—gits. It never rains but it pours. To the victor belong the spoils, et cetera, et cetera—”
“Money simply does not interest me.”
13
“Dick interests you. I don’t know to what extent, but he interests you.”
“Don’t be sentimental, Billy. Just because you’re in love with Caroline, you can’t make all your other friends marry each other. Tell me what to do about this legacy. What is customary when you get a lump of money like that? I suppose I’ll have to begin to get rid of all this immediately.” There was more than a hint of tears in her voice, but she smiled at Billy bravely. “I’m so perfectly crazy about these—these cups and saucers, Billy. See the lovely way that rose is split to fit into the design. Oh, when do I come into possession, anyway?”
“You don’t come into possession right away, you know. You don’t inherit for a couple of years, under the Rhode Island law. The formalities will take—”
“Billy Boynton, do you mean to say that I won’t have to do a blessed thing about this money for two years?” Nancy shrieked.
“Why, no. It takes a certain amount of red tape to settle an estate, to probate a will, etc., and the law allows a period of time, varying in different states—”
14
“Oho! Is there anything in all this universe so stupid as a man?” Nancy interrupted fervently. “Why didn’t you tell me that before? Do you suppose I care how much money I have two years from now? Two years of freedom, why, that’s all I want, Billy. There you’ve been sitting up winking and blinking at me like a sympathetic old owl, when all I needed to know was that I had two years of grace. Of course, I’ll go on with my tea-room, and not a soul shall know the difference.”
“While the feminine temperament has my hearty admiration and my most cordial endorsement,” Billy murmured, “there are things about it—”
“I won’t have to tell anybody, will I?”
“There’s no law to that effect. If your friends don’t know it from you, they’re not likely to hear it.”
“I haven’t mentioned it,” Nancy said. “I only told you, because it seemed rather in your line of work, and I was getting so much mail about it, I thought it would be wise to have some one look it over.”
“I’ve given up my law practice and Caroline for three days in your service.”
15
“You’ve done more than well, Billy, and I’m grateful to you. Of course, you would have saved me days of nervous wear and tear if it had only occurred to you to tell me the one simple little thing that was the essential point of the whole matter. If I had known that I didn’t inherit for two years, I wouldn’t have cared what was in that will.”
Billy stared at her feelingly.
“A peculiar sensation always comes over me,” he said musingly, “after I spend several hours uninterruptedly in the society of a woman who is using her mind in any way. I couldn’t explain it to you exactly. It’s a kind of impression that my own brain has begun to disintegrate, and to—”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Billy.” Nancy soothed him sweetly—Billy was not one of the people to whom she habitually allowed full conversational leeway: “Swear you won’t tell Caroline or Betty—or Dick.”
“I swear.”
Nancy held out her hand to him.
“You’re a good boy,” she said, “and I appreciate you, which is more than Caroline does, I’m afraid. Run along and see her now—I 16 don’t need you any more, and you’re probably dying to.”
Billy bowed over her hand, lingeringly and politely, but once releasing it, he shook his big frame, and straightening up, drew a long deep breath of something very like relief.
“With all deference to your delightful sex,” he said, “the only society that I’m dying for at the present moment is that of the old family bar-keep.”
As Billy left her, Nancy turned to her basement window, and stood looking out at the quaint stone court he had to cross in order to reach the high gate that guarded the entrance to the marble worker’s establishment, under the shadow of which it was her intention to open her out-of-door tea-room. She watched him dreamily is he made his way among the cinerary urns, the busts and statues and bas-reliefs that were a part of the stock in trade of her incongruous business associate.
In her investigation of the various sorts and conditions of restaurants in New York, she characteristically hit upon the garden restaurant, a commonplace in the down-town table d’hôte district, as the ideal setting for her 17 adventure in practical philanthropy, while the ubiquitous tea-room and antique-shop combination gave her the inspiration to stage her own undertaking even more spectacularly. Her enterprise was destined to flourish picturesquely in the open court during the fair months of the year, and in the winter months, or in the event of a bad storm, to be housed under the eaves in the rambling garret of the old brick building, the lower floor of which was given over to traffic in marbles.
She sighed happily. Billy, extricating himself from the grasp of an outstretched marble hand, which bad seemed to clutch desperately at his elbow, and narrowly escaping a plunge into a too convenient bird’s bath, turned to see her eyes following him, and waved gaily, but she scarcely realized that he had done so. It was rather with the eye of her mind that she was contemplating the dark, quadrangular area outstretched before her. In spirit she was moving to and fro among the statuary, bringing a housewifely order out of the chaos that prevailed—placing stone ladies draped in stone or otherwise; cherubic babies, destined to perpetual cold water bathing; strange mortuary 18 furniture, in the juxtaposition that would make the most effective background for her enterprise.
She saw the gritty, gray paving stones of the court cleared of their litter, and scoured free from discoloration and grime, set with dozens of little tables immaculate in snowy napery and shiny silver, and arranged with careful irregularity at the most alluring angle. She saw a staff of Hebe-like waitresses in blue chambray and pink ribbons, to match the chinaware, and all bearing a marked resemblance to herself in her last flattering photograph, moving among a crowd of well brought up but palpably impoverished young people—mostly social workers and artists. They were all young, and most of them very beautiful. In all her twenty-five years, she had never before been so close to a vision realized, as she was at that moment.
“Outside Inn,” she said to herself, still smiling. “It’s a perfect name for it, really. Outside Inn!”
19
CHAPTER II
Applicants for Blue Chambray
Ann Martin was an orphan of New England extraction. Her father, the eldest child of a simple unpretentious country family in Western Massachusetts, had been a brilliant but erratic throw-back to Mayflower traditions and Puritan intellectualism. He had married a girl with much the same ancestry as his own, but herself born and brought up in New York, and of a generation to which the assumption of prerogative was a natural rather than an acquired characteristic. The possession of a comfortable degree of fortune and culture was a matter of course with Ann Winslow, while to poor David Martin education in the finer things of life, and