The Lovely Lady Part 4

"Oh, _excuse_ me!" She turned her head aside for a moment in her long gloves. "You _are_ country!" she said again, but it seemed not to displease her. "I don't care so much for her voice, do you?" She turned on the singer. They discussed the entertainment and the dinner. They were a long time about it. The orchestra played a waltz at last, and Ethel--she had told him to call her that--put her arms on the table and leaned across to him, and though Peter knew by this time that her cheeks were painted, he didn't somehow mind it.

"What's it like up in the country where you lived?" she wished to know.

"Hills mostly, little wooded ones, and high pastures, and the apple orchards going right up over them...."

"I know," she nodded. "I guess it's them I been smelling ... or laylocks."

"Things coming up in the garden," Peter contributed: "peonies, and long rows of daffodils...." He did not realize it, but he had described to her no place that he had known but the way to the House. The girl cut him off.

"Don't!" she said sharply. "You know," she half apologized, "you kind of remind me of somebody ... a boy I knew up country. It was him that got me here----" She made her little admission quietly, the horror of it long worn down to daily habit. "That first time I saw you, it seemed almost as if it was him ... I ain't never blamed him--much. He didn't mean to be bad, but when the trouble came he couldn't help none.... I guess real help is about the hardest thing to find there is."

"I guess it is."

"Oh, well, we gotta make the best of it." She glanced at Peter with her head on one side as she twiddled her fingers across the cloth to the tune of the orchestra.

They went out at last and walked in the least frequented streets, and Peter held her hand; the warmth of it ran with a pleasant tingling in his veins. He seemed to have touched in her palm the point at which the city came alive to him. They walked and walked and yet it seemed that something lacked to bring the evening to a finish; it was incredible to Peter that after all his loneliness he should have to let her go.

"We could go up to my place," Ethel suggested. "It's up here." He hadn't suspected that she had been guiding him.

"I guess not to-night." Peter's blood was singing in his ears. In the dark of the unfrequented street he could feel her young body leaning toward his.

"Say, you know I ain't after the money the way some girls are; I like you ... honest----"

"I guess I'd better go home." But they went on up the side street a little farther. "Good-bye," he said, but he did not let her go.

She shook her hand free at last.

"Oh, well, of course, if you don't want to...." He felt her soft hands fumbling at his face; she drew him down to a kiss. Suddenly she sprang away, laughing. "Go, you silly!"

"Ethel!" he cried, but he lost her in the dark. He should have let her go at that; he knew he should. In spite of her paying half, his dinner had cost him more than two ordinary dinners ... and besides.... He couldn't help, however, walking around by the viaduct for several evenings the next week, and at last he saw her. She was going by without speaking, but he got squarely in front of her.

"Ethel!"

She pretended just to have recognized him.

"Oh, you here? I thought you'd gone back to the country!"

"You aren't mad with me about ... the other night?" He did not quite know how to express the quality of his desertion.

"Who? Me?" airily. "Oh, I guess there's just as good fish in the sea----" She changed all at once under his young hunger for companions.h.i.+p. "You're good," she said; "you're the real thing."

"You're good, too," he was certain, "when you're with me."

"Oh, it rubs off. Say, kid, I guess you got folks at home you're sending money to and all that, and you got to get ahead in the world. Well, you don't want to have nothing to do with my kind, and that's straight." The deviltry she put on toward him failed pitifully. "Chase yourself, kid; I just ain't good for you any more." Nevertheless they moved along the parapet to the dark interval between the lights and there they kissed again, this time with no undercurrent.

"Good-bye, Ethel."

"Good-bye, boy." The little spark was out.

PART THREE

IN WHICH PETER BECOMES A BACHELOR

PART THREE

IN WHICH PETER BECOMES A BACHELOR

I

The day before leaving for his summer vacation Peter was notified that he was wanted in his private office by the younger Siegel Brother.

Though he couldn't quite fall in with the dark prognostications of Blinders that he was about to be mulcted of his salary by a plot which had been plainly indicated by the marked partiality of our Mr. Croker, the incident gave him some uneasiness. The young Siegel Brother must have been younger than somebody of course, though it couldn't have been by more than a scratch, and he might have been any age without betraying it, so deeply was he sunk in the evidence of the surpa.s.sing quality of the grocery department. However, there was something surprisingly young looking out at Peter from the junior brother's red and white rotundity, at which he took heart immensely.

"Weatheral, Peter, canned goods, recommended by Mr. Greenslet," Siegel Brother ticked him off from a manilla envelope. "Just a little honorarium, Mr. Weatheral, we are in the habit of distributing to such of our employees as make practical suggestions to the advantage of the business." Contriving to make his hands meet in front of him by clasping them very high up on his chest, Siegel Brother a.s.sumed that he had folded his arms, and waited to see what Peter would do about it.

"We have also a little savings bank for the benefit of our employees which pays 3 per cent., yet I believe we have you not among our depositors." There was the slightest possible burr to his speech as though it were blunted by so much fatness.

"Well, you see, sir--there's a mortgage." Peter was afraid he should damage himself by the admission, but the firm heard him out.

"How much?"

"It was a thousand, but we've got it down to seven hundred--six hundred and sixty," Peter corrected himself with a glance at his honorarium.

"And the farm, it is worth----" Siegel Brother parted his hands slightly to admit of any valuation.

"Two thousand."

"So! Well, Mr. Weatheral, that is not so bad, and if I were you, when I had occasion to speak of it I would say, not 'I am paying a mortgage,'

that is dead work, Mr. Weatheral, but 'I am buying a farm.' It goes easier so."

"Thank you, sir, I'll remember." He supposed his employer was done with him, but as he turned to go he heard his name again.

"You will report to our Mr. Croker when you return, Mr. Weatheral; he thinks he can use you."

Two weeks later when he came back rested from Bloombury, Peter found himself visible to at least ten persons, all of whom pertained to the boarding-house of the exclusive Mrs. Blodgett, where, by the advice of J. Wilkinson Cohn, he engaged a small room on the third floor with a window opening some six feet from the rear wall of a wholesale stationery, and one electric light discreetly placed to discourage the habit of reading in bed.

From this time on he was visible to Mrs. Blodgett and Aggie and Miss Thatcher, whom he already knew as the pure food demonstrator in dairy products, to two inconsiderable young women from the wholesale stationer's, and a gentleman from a shoe store, the whole of whose physiognomy appeared to be occupied with the effort to express an engaging youthfulness which the crown of his head explicitly denied. He was occasionally visible to the representative of gentlemen's outfitters who was engaged to Aggie and took Sunday dinners with them, and he was particularly and pleasingly visible to J. Wilkinson Cohn and Miss Minnie Havens. The rest of his fellow boarders were so much of a likeness, a kind of family likeness that spread all over Siegel Brothers and such parts of the city as Peter had been admitted to, that it was a relief to Peter to realize from his profile that J. Wilkinson's last name probably ought to have been spelled Cohen. The determinedly young gentleman explained to him that J. Wilkinson's intrusion into the exclusiveness of Blodgett's was largely a concession to Aggie's being as good as married and not liable to social contamination, and to the fact that the little Jew was amusing and pretty near white, anyway.

Miss Minnie Havens did typewriting and stenography in a downtown office and was understood to be in search of economic independence, rather than under the necessity of making a living. She had a high fluffy pompadour and a half discoverable smile which could be brought to a very agreeable laugh if one spent a little pains at it. J. Wilkinson Cohn appeared to find it worth the pains.