The Efficiency Expert Part 10

She went on with her breakfast while Jimmy set up an adjoining table.

Presently when he came to fill her water-gla.s.s she looked up at him again.

"I like you, kid," she said. "You're not fresh. You know what I am as well as the rest of them, but you wait on me just the same as you would on"--she hesitated and there was a little catch in her voice as she finished her sentence--"just the same as you would on a decent girl."

Jimmy looked at her in surprise. It was the first indication that he had ever had from an habitue of Feinheimer's that there might lurk within their b.r.e.a.s.t.s any of the finer characteristics whose outward indices are pride and shame. He was momentarily at a loss as to what to say, and as he hesitated the girl's gaze went past him and she exclaimed:

"Look who's here!"

Jimmy turned to look at the newcomer, and saw the Lizard directly behind him.

"Howdy, bo," said his benefactor. "I thought I'd come in and give you the once-over. And here's Little Eva with a plate of ham and at four o'clock in the afternoon."

The Lizard dropped into a chair at the table with the girl, and after Jimmy had taken his order and departed for the kitchen Little Eva jerked her thumb toward his retreating figure.

"Friend of yours?" she asked.

"He might have a worse friend," replied the Lizard non-committally.

"What's his graft?" asked the girl.

"He ain't got none except being on the square. It's funny," the Lizard philosophized, "but here's me with a bank roll that would choke a horse, and you probably with a stocking full of dough, and I'll bet all the money I ever had or ever expect to have if one of us could change places with that poor simp we'd do it."

"He is a square guy, isn't he?" said the girl. "You can almost tell it by looking at him. How did you come to know him?"

"Oh, that's a long story," said the Lizard. "We room at the same place, but I knew him before that."

"On Indiana near Eighteenth?" asked the girl.

"How the h.e.l.l did you know?" he queried.

"I know a lot of things I ain't supposed to know," replied she.

"You're a wise guy, all right, Eva, and one thing I like about you is that you don't let anything you know hurt you."

And then, after a pause: "I like him," she said. "What's his name?"

The Lizard eyed her for a moment.

"Don't you get to liking him too much," he said. "That bird's the cla.s.s.

He ain't for any little--"

"Cut it!" exclaimed the girl. "I'm as good as you are and a d.a.m.n straighter. What I get I earn, and I don't steal it."

The Lizard grinned. "I guess you're right at that; but don't try to pull him down any lower than he is. He is coming up again some day to where he belongs."

"I ain't going to try to pull him down," said the girl. "And anyhow, when were you made his G.o.dfather?"

Jimmy saw Eva almost daily for many weeks. He saw her at her post-meridian breakfast--sober and subdued; he saw her later in the evening, in various stages of exhilaration, but at those times she did not come to his table and seldom if ever did he catch her eye.

They talked a great deal while she breakfasted, and he learned to like the girl and to realize that she possessed two personalities. The one which he liked dominated her at breakfast; the other which he loathed guided her actions later in the evening. Neither of them ever referred to those hours of her life, and as the days pa.s.sed Jimmy found himself looking forward to the hour when Little Eva would come to Feinheimer's for her breakfast.

CHAPTER XI.

CHRISTMAS EVE.

It was Christmas Eve. Elizabeth Compton and Harriet Holden were completing the rounds of their friends' homes with Christmas remembrances--a custom that they had continued since childhood. The last parcel had been delivered upon the South Side, and they were now being driven north on Michigan Boulevard toward home. Elizabeth directed the chauffeur to turn over Van Buren to State, which at this season of the year was almost alive with belated Christmas shoppers and those other thousands who always seize upon the slightest pretext for a celebration.

It was a noisy, joyous crowd whose spirit, harmonizing with the bright lights and the gay shop windows, infected all who came within its influence. As the car moved slowly northward along the world's greatest retail street the girls leaned forward to watch the pa.s.sing throng through the windows.

"Isn't it wonderful," exclaimed Harriet, "what a transformation a few lights make? Who would ever think of State Street as a fairy-land? And yet, if you half close your eyes the hallucination is complete. Even the people who by daylight are shoddy and care-worn take on an appearance of romance and gaiety, and the tawdry colored lights are the scintillant gems of the garden of a fairy prince."

"Don't!" Elizabeth pleaded. "The city night always affects me. It makes me want to do something adventurous, and on Christmas Eve it is even worse. If you keep on like that I shall soon be telling David to drive us up and down State Street all night."

"I wish we didn't have to go home right away," said Harriet. "I feel like doing something devilish."

"Well, let's!" exclaimed Elizabeth.

"Do something devilish?" inquired Harriet. "What, for instance?"

"Oh, 'most anything that we shouldn't do," replied Elizabeth, "and there isn't anything that we could do down here alone that we should do."

They both laughed. "I have it!" exclaimed Elizabeth suddenly. "We'll be utterly abandoned--we'll have supper at Feinheimer's without an escort."

Harriet cast a horrified glance at her companion. "Why, Elizabeth Compton," she cried, "you wouldn't dare. You know you wouldn't dare!"

"Do you dare me?" asked the other.

"But suppose some one should see us?" argued Harriet. "Your father would never forgive us."

"If we see any one in Feinheimer's who knows us," argued Elizabeth shrewdly, "they will be just as glad to forget it as we. And anyway it will do it no harm. I shall have David stay right outside the door so that if I call him he can come. I don't know what I would do without David. He is a sort of Rock of Ages and Gibraltar all in one."

Through the speaking-tube Elizabeth directed David to drive to Feinheimer's, and, whatever David may have thought of the order, he gave no outward indication of it.

Christmas Eve at Feinheimer's is, or was, a riot of unconfined hilarity, although the code of ethics of the place was on a higher plane than that which governed the Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve patrons of so-called respectable restaurants, where a woman is not safe from insult even though she be properly escorted, while in Feinheimer's a woman with an escort was studiously avoided by the other celebrators unless she chose to join with them. As there was only one cla.s.s of women who came to Feinheimer's at night without escort, the male habitues had no difficulty in determining who they might approach and who they might not.

Jimmy Torrance was as busy as a cranberry merchant. He had four tables to attend to, and while the amount of food he served grew more and more negligible as the evening progressed, his trips to the bar were exceedingly frequent. One of his tables had been vacated for a few minutes when, upon his return from the bar with a round of drinks for Steve Murray and his party he saw that two women had entered and were occupying his fourth table. Their backs were toward him, and he gave them but little attention other than to note that they were unescorted and to immediately catalogue them accordingly. Having distributed Steve Murray's order, Jimmy turned toward his new patrons, and, laying a menu card before each, he stood between them waiting for their order.

"What shall we take?" asked Elizabeth of Harriet. Then: "What have you that's good?" and she looked up at the waiter.

Jimmy prided himself upon self-control, and his serving at Feinheimer's had still further schooled him in the repression of any outward indication of his emotions. For, as most men of his cla.s.s, he had a well-defined conception of what const.i.tuted a perfect waiter, one of the requisites being utter indifference to any of the affairs of his patrons outside of those things which actually pertained to his duties as a servitor; but in this instance Jimmy realized that he had come very close to revealing the astonishment which he felt on seeing this girl in Feinheimer's and unescorted.

If Jimmy was schooled in self-control, Elizabeth Compton was equally so.

She recognized the waiter immediately, but not even by a movement of an eyelid did she betray the fact; which may possibly be accounted for by the fact that it meant little more to her than as though she had chanced to see the same street-sweeper several times in succession, although after he had left with their order she asked Harriet if she, too, had recognized him.

"Immediately," replied her friend. "It doesn't seem possible that such a good-looking chap should be occupying such a menial position."