BY COURIER


It was neither the season nor the hour when the Park had frequenters;
and it is likely that the young lady, who was seated on one of the
benches at the side of the walk, had merely obeyed a sudden impulse to
sit for a while and enjoy a foretaste of coming Spring.

She rested there, pensive and still. A certain melancholy that touched
her countenance must have been of recent birth, for it had not yet
altered the fine and youthful contours of her cheek, nor subdued the
arch though resolute curve of her lips.

A tall young man came striding through the park along the path near
which she sat. Behind him tagged a boy carrying a suit-case. At sight
of the young lady, the man’s face changed to red and back to pale
again. He watched her countenance as he drew nearer, with hope and
anxiety mingled on his own. He passed within a few yards of her, but he
saw no evidence that she was aware of his presence or existence.

Some fifty yards further on he suddenly stopped and sat on a bench at
one side. The boy dropped the suit-case and stared at him with
wondering, shrewd eyes. The young man took out his handkerchief and
wiped his brow. It was a good handkerchief, a good brow, and the young
man was good to look at. He said to the boy:

“I want you to take a message to that young lady on that bench. Tell
her I am on my way to the station, to leave for San Francisco, where I
shall join that Alaska moose-hunting expedition. Tell her that, since
she has commanded me neither to speak nor to write to her, I take this
means of making one last appeal to her sense of justice, for the sake
of what has been. Tell her that to condemn and discard one who has not
deserved such treatment, without giving him her reasons or a chance to
explain is contrary to her nature as I believe it to be. Tell her that
I have thus, to a certain degree, disobeyed her injunctions, in the
hope that she may yet be inclined to see justice done. Go, and tell her
that.”

The young man dropped a half-dollar into the boy’s hand. The boy looked
at him for a moment with bright, canny eyes out of a dirty, intelligent
face, and then set off at a run. He approached the lady on the bench a
little doubtfully, but unembarrassed. He touched the brim of the old
plaid bicycle cap perched on the back of his head. The lady looked at
him coolly, without prejudice or favour.

“Lady,” he said, “dat gent on de oder bench sent yer a song and dance
by me. If yer don’t know de guy, and he’s tryin’ to do de Johnny act,
say de word, and I’ll call a cop in t’ree minutes. If yer does know
him, and he’s on de square, w’y I’ll spiel yer de bunch of hot air he
sent yer.”

The young lady betrayed a faint interest.

“A song and dance!” she said, in a deliberate sweet voice that seemed
to clothe her words in a diaphanous garment of impalpable irony. “A new
idea—in the troubadour line, I suppose. I—used to know the gentleman
who sent you, so I think it will hardly be necessary to call the
police. You may execute your song and dance, but do not sing too
loudly. It is a little early yet for open-air vaudeville, and we might
attract attention.”

“Awe,” said the boy, with a shrug down the length of him, “yer know
what I mean, lady. ’Tain’t a turn, it’s wind. He told me to tell yer
he’s got his collars and cuffs in dat grip for a scoot clean out to
’Frisco. Den he’s goin’ to shoot snow-birds in de Klondike. He says yer
told him not to send ’round no more pink notes nor come hangin’ over de
garden gate, and he takes dis means of puttin’ yer wise. He says yer
refereed him out like a has-been, and never give him no chance to kick
at de decision. He says yer swiped him, and never said why.”

The slightly awakened interest in the young lady’s eyes did not abate.
Perhaps it was caused by either the originality or the audacity of the
snow-bird hunter, in thus circumventing her express commands against
the ordinary modes of communication. She fixed her eye on a statue
standing disconsolate in the dishevelled park, and spoke into the
transmitter:

“Tell the gentleman that I need not repeat to him a description of my
ideals. He knows what they have been and what they still are. So far as
they touch on this case, absolute loyalty and truth are the ones
paramount. Tell him that I have studied my own heart as well as one
can, and I know its weakness as well as I do its needs. That is why I
decline to hear his pleas, whatever they may be. I did not condemn him
through hearsay or doubtful evidence, and that is why I made no charge.
But, since he persists in hearing what he already well knows, you may
convey the matter.

“Tell him that I entered the conservatory that evening from the rear,
to cut a rose for my mother. Tell him I saw him and Miss Ashburton
beneath the pink oleander. The tableau was pretty, but the pose and
juxtaposition were too eloquent and evident to require explanation. I
left the conservatory, and, at the same time, the rose and my ideal.
You may carry that song and dance to your impresario.”

“I’m shy on one word, lady. Jux—jux—put me wise on dat, will yer?”

“Juxtaposition—or you may call it propinquity—or, if you like, being
rather too near for one maintaining the position of an ideal.”

The gravel spun from beneath the boy’s feet. He stood by the other
bench. The man’s eyes interrogated him, hungrily. The boy’s were
shining with the impersonal zeal of the translator.

“De lady says dat she’s on to de fact dat gals is dead easy when a
feller comes spielin’ ghost stories and tryin’ to make up, and dat’s
why she won’t listen to no soft-soap. She says she caught yer dead to
rights, huggin’ a bunch o’ calico in de hot-house. She side-stepped in
to pull some posies and yer was squeezin’ de oder gal to beat de band.
She says it looked cute, all right all right, but it made her sick. She
says yer better git busy, and make a sneak for de train.”

The young man gave a low whistle and his eyes flashed with a sudden
thought. His hand flew to the inside pocket of his coat, and drew out a
handful of letters. Selecting one, he handed it to the boy, following
it with a silver dollar from his vest-pocket.

“Give that letter to the lady,” he said, “and ask her to read it. Tell
her that it should explain the situation. Tell her that, if she had
mingled a little trust with her conception of the ideal, much heartache
might have been avoided. Tell her that the loyalty she prizes so much
has never wavered. Tell her I am waiting for an answer.”

The messenger stood before the lady.

“De gent says he’s had de ski-bunk put on him widout no cause. He says
he’s no bum guy; and, lady, yer read dat letter, and I’ll bet yer he’s
a white sport, all right.”

The young lady unfolded the letter; somewhat doubtfully, and read it.


Dear Dr. Arnold:   I want to thank you for your most kind and opportune
aid to my daughter last Friday evening, when she was overcome by an
attack of her old heart-trouble in the conservatory at Mrs. Waldron’s
reception. Had you not been near to catch her as she fell and to render
proper attention, we might have lost her. I would be glad if you would
call and undertake the treatment of her case.

  Gratefully yours,

Robert Ashburton.


The young lady refolded the letter, and handed it to the boy.

“De gent wants an answer,” said the messenger. “Wot’s de word?”

The lady’s eyes suddenly flashed on him, bright, smiling and wet.

“Tell that guy on the other bench,” she said, with a happy, tremulous
laugh, “that his girl wants him.”




THE FURNISHED ROOM


Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of
the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side.
Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to
furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in
heart and mind. They sing “Home, Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry
their _lares et penates_ in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a
picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.

Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers,
should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but
it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the
wake of all these vagrant guests.

One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red
mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean
hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and
forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow
depths.

To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a
housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that
had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy
with edible lodgers.

He asked if there was a room to let.

“Come in,” said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her
throat seemed lined with fur. “I have the third floor back, vacant
since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?”

The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no
particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod
noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn.
It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank,
sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to
the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At
each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants
had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and
tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but
it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them
forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished
pit below.

“This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. “It’s
a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in
it last summer—no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute.
The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three
months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B’retta Sprowls—you may
have heard of her—Oh, that was just the stage names—right there over
the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is
here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody
likes. It never stays idle long.”

“Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?” asked the young man.

“They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with
the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people
never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they
goes.”

He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he
said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The
room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the
housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question
that he carried at the end of his tongue.

“A young girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember such a
one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely.
A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and
a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”

“No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they change
as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call
that one to mind.”

No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the
inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers,
agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres
from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find
what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find
her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great,
water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous
quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its
upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.

The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of
pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the
specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected
gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a
couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two
windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a
corner.

The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in
speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to
him of its divers tenantry.

A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical
islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the
gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from
house to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding
Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline
was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew
like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate
flotsam cast aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne
them to a fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a
medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.

One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the
little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests
developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of
the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny
finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel
their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of
a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had
splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass
had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name
“Marie.” It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished
room had turned in fury—perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its
garish coldness—and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was
chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a
horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some
grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great
slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its
particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It
seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon
the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it
may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the
resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A
hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.

The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file,
soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room
furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering
and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold,
the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a
banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains
roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he
breathed the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a
cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the
reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.

Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the
strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of
wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost
seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: “What, dear?” as if
he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung
to him and wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his
senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be
peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But,
was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?

“She has been in this room,” he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a
token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had
belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of
mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own—whence came
it?

The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the
flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet,
indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of
mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their
triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he
came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his
face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the
floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a
pawnbroker’s card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of
dreams. In the last was a woman’s black satin hair bow, which halted
him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is
femininity’s demure, impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.

And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the
walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and
knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the
drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive
that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging
to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses
that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he
answered loudly: “Yes, dear!” and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on
vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and
outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that
odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped.

He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes.
These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the
matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a
green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found
dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of
her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit
seemed to hover there, he found no trace.

And then he thought of the housekeeper.

He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a
crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement
as best he could.

“Will you tell me, madam,” he besought her, “who occupied the room I
have before I came?”

“Yes, sir. I can tell you again. ’Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said.
Miss B’retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was.
My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate
hung, framed, on a nail over—”

“What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls—in looks, I mean?”

“Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They
left a week ago Tuesday.”

“And before they occupied it?”

“Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business.
He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two
children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle,
whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a
year, sir, and further I do not remember.”

He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The
essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had
departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house
furniture, of atmosphere in storage.

The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow,
singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the
sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly
into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut
he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself
gratefully upon the bed.


It was Mrs. McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched
it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where
house-keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.

“I rented out my third floor, back, this evening,” said Mrs. Purdy,
across a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed
two hours ago.”

“Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am?” said Mrs. McCool, with intense
admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did
ye tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with
mystery.

“Rooms,” said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to
rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.”

“’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have
the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict
the rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’
in the bed of it.”

“As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs. Purdy.

“Yis, ma’am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay
out the third floor, back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be
killin’ herself wid the gas—a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy,
ma’am.”

“She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs. Purdy, assenting
but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow.
Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.”




THE BRIEF DÉBUT OF TILDY


If you do not know Bogle’s Chop House and Family Restaurant it is your
loss. For if you are one of the fortunate ones who dine expensively you
should be interested to know how the other half consumes provisions.
And if you belong to the half to whom waiters’ checks are things of
moment, you should know Bogle’s, for there you get your money’s
worth—in quantity, at least.

Bogle’s is situated in that highway of _bourgeoisie_, that boulevard of
Brown-Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue. There are two rows of tables
in the room, six in each row. On each table is a caster-stand,
containing cruets of condiments and seasons. From the pepper cruet you
may shake a cloud of something tasteless and melancholy, like volcanic
dust. From the salt cruet you may expect nothing. Though a man should
extract a sanguinary stream from the pallid turnip, yet will his
prowess be balked when he comes to wrest salt from Bogle’s cruets. Also
upon each table stands the counterfeit of that benign sauce made “from
the recipe of a nobleman in India.”

At the cashier’s desk sits Bogle, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and
takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change,
files your check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the
weather. Beyond a corroboration of his meteorological statement you
would better not venture. You are not Bogle’s friend; you are a fed,
transient customer, and you and he may not meet again until the blowing
of Gabriel’s dinner horn. So take your change and go—to the devil if
you like. There you have Bogle’s sentiments.

The needs of Bogle’s customers were supplied by two waitresses and a
Voice. One of the waitresses was named Aileen. She was tall, beautiful,
lively, gracious and learned in persiflage. Her other name? There was
no more necessity for another name at Bogle’s than there was for
finger-bowls.

The name of the other waitress was Tildy. Why do you suggest Matilda?
Please listen this time—Tildy—Tildy. Tildy was dumpy, plain-faced, and
too anxious to please to please. Repeat the last clause to yourself
once or twice, and make the acquaintance of the duplicate infinite.

The Voice at Bogle’s was invisible. It came from the kitchen, and did
not shine in the way of originality. It was a heathen Voice, and
contented itself with vain repetitions of exclamations emitted by the
waitresses concerning food.

Will it tire you to be told again that Aileen was beautiful? Had she
donned a few hundred dollars’ worth of clothes and joined the Easter
parade, and had you seen her, you would have hastened to say so
yourself.

The customers at Bogle’s were her slaves. Six tables full she could
wait upon at once. They who were in a hurry restrained their impatience
for the joy of merely gazing upon her swiftly moving, graceful figure.
They who had finished eating ate more that they might continue in the
light of her smiles. Every man there—and they were mostly men—tried to
make his impression upon her.

Aileen could successfully exchange repartee against a dozen at once.
And every smile that she sent forth lodged, like pellets from a
scatter-gun, in as many hearts. And all this while she would be
performing astounding feats with orders of pork and beans, pot roasts,
ham-and, sausage-and-the-wheats, and any quantity of things on the iron
and in the pan and straight up and on the side. With all this feasting
and flirting and merry exchange of wit Bogle’s came mighty near being a
salon, with Aileen for its Madame Récamier.

If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the
regulars were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the
steady customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At
least twice a week some one took her to a theatre or to a dance. One
stout gentleman whom she and Tildy had privately christened “The Hog”
presented her with a turquoise ring. Another one known as “Freshy,” who
rode on the Traction Company’s repair wagon, was going to give her a
poodle as soon as his brother got the hauling contract in the Ninth.
And the man who always ate spareribs and spinach and said he was a
stock broker asked her to go to “Parsifal” with him.

“I don’t know where this place is,” said Aileen while talking it over
with Tildy, “but the wedding-ring’s got to be on before I put a stitch
into a travelling dress—ain’t that right? Well, I guess!”

But, Tildy!

In steaming, chattering, cabbage-scented Bogle’s there was almost a
heart tragedy. Tildy with the blunt nose, the hay-coloured hair, the
freckled skin, the bag-o’-meal figure, had never had an admirer. Not a
man followed her with his eyes when she went to and fro in the
restaurant save now and then when they glared with the beast-hunger for
food. None of them bantered her gaily to coquettish interchanges of
wit. None of them loudly “jollied” her of mornings as they did Aileen,
accusing her, when the eggs were slow in coming, of late hours in the
company of envied swains. No one had ever given her a turquoise ring or
invited her upon a voyage to mysterious, distant “Parsifal.”

Tildy was a good waitress, and the men tolerated her. They who sat at
her tables spoke to her briefly with quotations from the bill of fare;
and then raised their voices in honeyed and otherwise-flavoured
accents, eloquently addressed to the fair Aileen. They writhed in their
chairs to gaze around and over the impending form of Tildy, that
Aileen’s pulchritude might season and make ambrosia of their bacon and
eggs.

And Tildy was content to be the unwooed drudge if Aileen could receive
the flattery and the homage. The blunt nose was loyal to the short
Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule
hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon
meringue. But deep below our freckles and hay-coloured hair the
unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but
coming to us alone.

There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly
bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any
optic.

“Fresh guy,” explained Aileen, “last night as I was going home at
Twenty-third and Sixth. Sashayed up, so he did, and made a break. I
turned him down, cold, and he made a sneak; but followed me down to
Eighteenth, and tried his hot air again. Gee! but I slapped him a good
one, side of the face. Then he give me that eye. Does it look real
awful, Til? I should hate that Mr. Nicholson should see it when he
comes in for his tea and toast at ten.”

Tildy listened to the adventure with breathless admiration. No man had
ever tried to follow her. She was safe abroad at any hour of the
twenty-four. What bliss it must have been to have had a man follow one
and black one’s eye for love!

Among the customers at Bogle’s was a young man named Seeders, who
worked in a laundry office. Mr. Seeders was thin and had light hair,
and appeared to have been recently rough-dried and starched. He was too
diffident to aspire to Aileen’s notice; so he usually sat at one of
Tildy’s tables, where he devoted himself to silence and boiled
weakfish.

One day when Mr. Seeders came in to dinner he had been drinking beer.
There were only two or three customers in the restaurant. When Mr.
Seeders had finished his weakfish he got up, put his arm around Tildy’s
waist, kissed her loudly and impudently, walked out upon the street,
snapped his fingers in the direction of the laundry, and hied himself
to play pennies in the slot machines at the Amusement Arcade.

For a few moments Tildy stood petrified. Then she was aware of Aileen
shaking at her an arch forefinger, and saying:

“Why, Til, you naughty girl! Ain’t you getting to be awful, Miss
Slyboots! First thing I know you’ll be stealing some of my fellows. I
must keep an eye on you, my lady.”

Another thing dawned upon Tildy’s recovering wits. In a moment she had
advanced from a hopeless, lowly admirer to be an Eve-sister of the
potent Aileen. She herself was now a man-charmer, a mark for Cupid, a
Sabine who must be coy when the Romans were at their banquet boards.
Man had found her waist achievable and her lips desirable. The sudden
and amatory Seeders had, as it were, performed for her a miraculous
piece of one-day laundry work. He had taken the sackcloth of her
uncomeliness, had washed, dried, starched and ironed it, and returned
it to her sheer embroidered lawn—the robe of Venus herself.

The freckles on Tildy’s cheeks merged into a rosy flush. Now both Circe
and Psyche peeped from her brightened eyes. Not even Aileen herself had
been publicly embraced and kissed in the restaurant.

Tildy could not keep the delightful secret. When trade was slack she
went and stood at Bogle’s desk. Her eyes were shining; she tried not to
let her words sound proud and boastful.

“A gentleman insulted me to-day,” she said. “He hugged me around the
waist and kissed me.”

“That so?” said Bogle, cracking open his business armour. “After this
week you get a dollar a week more.”

At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with whom
she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one whose
merit needed no bolstering:

“A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm
around my waist and kissed me.”

The diners accepted the revelation in various ways—some incredulously,
some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of
badinage that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy’s
heart swelled in her bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance
rise above the horizon of the grey plain in which she had for so long
travelled.

For two days Mr. Seeders came not again. During that time Tildy
established herself firmly as a woman to be wooed. She bought ribbons,
and arranged her hair like Aileen’s, and tightened her waist two
inches. She had a thrilling but delightful fear that Mr. Seeders would
rush in suddenly and shoot her with a pistol. He must have loved her
desperately; and impulsive lovers are always blindly jealous.

Even Aileen had not been shot at with a pistol. And then Tildy rather
hoped that he would not shoot at her, for she was always loyal to
Aileen; and she did not want to overshadow her friend.

At 4 o’clock on the afternoon of the third day Mr. Seeders came in.
There were no customers at the tables. At the back end of the
restaurant Tildy was refilling the mustard pots and Aileen was
quartering pies. Mr. Seeders walked back to where they stood.

Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon
against her heart. A red hair-bow was in her hair; she wore Venus’s
Eighth Avenue badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver
symbolic heart.

Mr. Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his
hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.

“Miss Tildy,” said he, “I want to apologise for what I done the other
evenin’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t
of done it. I wouldn’t do no lady that a-way when I was sober. So I
hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my ’pology, and believe that I wouldn’t
of done it if I’d known what I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.”

With this handsome plea Mr. Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling
that reparation had been made.

But behind the convenient screen Tildy had thrown herself flat upon a
table among the butter chips and the coffee cups, and was sobbing her
heart out—out and back again to the grey plain wherein travel they with
blunt noses and hay-coloured hair. From her knot she had torn the red
hair-bow and cast it upon the floor. Seeders she despised utterly; she
had but taken his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who
might have set the clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland.
But the kiss had been maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at
the false alarm; she must forevermore remain the Sleeping Beauty.

Yet not all was lost. Aileen’s arm was around her; and Tildy’s red hand
groped among the butter chips till it found the warm clasp of her
friend’s.

“Don’t you fret, Til,” said Aileen, who did not understand entirely.
“That turnip-faced little clothespin of a Seeders ain’t worth it. He
ain’t anything of a gentleman or he wouldn’t ever of apologised.”