The Landers had been gone a week before Clementina's mother decided that
she could spare her to Mrs. Atwell for a while. It was established that
she was not to serve either in the dining-room or the carving room; she
was not to wash dishes or to do any part of the chamber work, but to
carry messages and orders for the landlady, and to save her steps, when
she wished to see the head-waiter, or the head-cook; or to make an excuse
or a promise to some of the lady-boarders; or to send word to Mr. Atwell
about the buying, or to communicate with the clerk about rooms taken or
left.
She had a good deal of dignity of her own and such a gravity in the
discharge of her duties that the chef, who was a middle-aged Yankee with
grown girls of his own, liked to pretend that it was Mrs. Atwell herself
who was talking with him, and to discover just as she left him that it
was Clementina. He called her the Boss when he spoke of her to others in
her hearing, and he addressed her as Boss when he feigned to find that it
was not Mrs. Atwell. She did not mind that in him, and let the chef have
his joke as if it were not one. But one day when the clerk called her
Boss she merely looked at him without speaking, and made him feel that he
had taken a liberty which he must not repeat. He was a young man who much
preferred a state of self-satisfaction to humiliation of any sort, and
after he had endured Clementina's gaze as long as he could, he said,
"Perhaps you don't allow anybody but the chef to call you that?"
She did not answer, but repeated the message Mrs. Atwell had given her
for him, and went away.
It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the
young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to
look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by a
girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth, and
he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of trying
to bully her.
He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a college
student, though for the time being he ranked the student socially. He had
him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed a sort of little
private room for him, and talked with him at such hours of the forenoon
and the late evening as the student was off duty. He found comfort in the
student's fretful strength, which expressed itself in the pugnacious
frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright sorrel mustache was
beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.
Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure
with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he
wore habitually; but he thought Gregory's educational advantages told in
his face. His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he
acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he
wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of
the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several
coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a
number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been
so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.
One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the
desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who
sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing in
the distant parlor, Fane said. "Now, what'll you bet that they won't
every one of 'em come and look for a letter in her box before she goes to
bed? I tell you, girls are queer, and there's no place like a hotel to
study 'em."
"I don't want to study them," said Gregory, harshly.
"Think Greek's more worth your while, or know 'em well enough already?"
Fane suggested.
"No, I don't know them at all," said the student.
"I don't believe," urged the clerk, as if it were relevant, "that there's
a girl in the house that you couldn't marry, if you gave your mind to
it."