Outside Inn. Ethel M. Kelley
let me.” He waved an inclusive hand in the direction of Nancy and Betty.
“If you don’t behave,” Nancy said, while they waited for Michael to bring in the next 28 girl, “you can’t stay. If that is the kind of girl you men find attractive then my restaurant is doomed from the beginning. I wouldn’t have that girl in my employ for—”
Before she could begin again, applicant number two stood before them—a comfortable, kind-eyed girl, no longer very young but with efficiency written all over her, despite the shyness that beset her.
Nancy rubbed her hands with satisfaction and looked at Betty, who beamed back at her. The girl, encouraged by Nancy’s kindly smile took a step forward, and began to recite her qualifications for the position. Dick fumbled with a fountain-pen which he placed elaborately behind his ear for an instant, and then as ostentatiously removed.
“I think you’re losing a hairpin, Dick,” Billy suggested solicitously, as Nancy, ignoring their existence entirely, proceeded to make terms with the newcomer.
The next girl created a diversion—being palpably an adventuress out of a job and impressing none of the quartette as being interesting enough to deserve one—but the two girls who followed her were bright and sprightly 29 creatures, disarmingly graceful and ingenuous, of whom the entire quartette approved. They were twin sisters, they said, Dolly and Molly, and they had always had places together ever since they had begun working out.
“Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like—” Billy was addressing Molly gravely when Dick slipped a friendly but firm hand over his jugular region, and cut off his utterance.
“He’s not feeling quite himself,” he explained suavely to Dolly, “but we’ll bring him around soon.—I think you’ll find Miss Martin an ideal person to work for, and the salary and the hours unusually satisfactory.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Molly and Dolly together, in the English manner which showed the excellence of their training.
There were several other dubby creatures so much out of the picture that they were not even considered, and then Michael brought in what he called “a grand girl,” and left her standing statuesquely in their midst.
“With large lovely arms and a neck like a tower,” Dick quoted in his throat.
Nancy engaged her without enthusiasm.
30
“She’ll draw,” she said briefly. “Personally, I dislike these Alma Tadema girls.”
“What the men see,” Betty said, curling around the better part of two straight dining chairs, in the moment of relaxation that followed the final disposition of the business of the day, “in a girl like that first one is one of the mysteries of existence.”
“I know it,” Nancy agreed, with New England colloquialism. “You feel reasonably allied to them as a sex, and then suddenly they show some vulgar preference for a woman like that, and it’s all off.”
“This from the woman who thinks my chauffeur is an ideal of manly beauty,” Dick scoffed, “a dimpled man with a little finger ring.”
“He can run a car, though,” Nancy retorted.
“I’ll bet little blue eyes could run a restaurant.”
“That was just the trouble—she would have been running mine in twenty-four hours. Oh! I think what you men really like is a bossy woman.”
“Now, what a woman really likes in a man—” Betty began, “is—is—”
“Quality,” Nancy finished for her succinctly.
31
“I wonder—” Dick mused. “I should have said finish.”
“Almost any kind of finish so long as it is smooth enough,” Billy supplemented. “Look at the way they eat up this artistic and poetic veneer.”
“Look at the way they mangle their metaphors,” Nancy complained to Betty.
“I know what I really like in a woman,” Dick whispered to Nancy, as he helped her into her coat just before they started out together, “and you know what I like, too. That’s one of the subjects that needs no discussion between us.”
Betty and Billy walking up the avenue ahead of them—Outside Inn was located in one of the cross-streets in the thirties—were discussing their relation to one another.
“I wonder sometimes if Nancy’s got it in her really to care for a man,” Betty argued; “she’s as fond as she can be of Dick, but she’d sacrifice him heart, soul and body for that restaurant of hers. She’s a perfect darling, I don’t mean that; she’s the very essence of sweetness and kindness, but she doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate the possibilities of a 32 devotion like Dick’s. Do you think she’s really capable of loving anybody—of putting any man in the world before all her ideas and notions and experiments?”
“Lord, yes,” said Billy, accelerating his pace, suggestively in the hope of getting Betty home in good time for him to dress to keep his engagement with Caroline.
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