Gregory had an habitual severity with his own behavior which did not stop
there, but was always passing on to the behavior of others; and his days
went by in alternate offence and reparation to those he had to do with.
He had to do chiefly with the dining-room girls, whose susceptibilities
were such that they kept about their work bathed in tears or suffused
with anger much of the time. He was not only good-looking but he was a
college student, and their feelings were ready to bud toward him in
tender efflorescence, but he kept them cropped and blighted by his curt
words and impatient manner. Some of them loved him for the hurts he did
them, and some hated him, but all agreed fondly or furiously that he was
too cross for anything. They were mostly young school-mistresses, and
whether they were of a soft and amorous make, or of a forbidding temper,
they knew enough in spite of their hurts to value a young fellow whose
thoughts were not running upon girls all the time. Women, even in their
spring-time, like men to treat them as if they had souls as well as
hearts, and it was a saving grace in Gregory that he treated them all,
the silliest of them, as if they had souls. Very likely they responded
more with their hearts than with their souls, but they were aware that
this was not his fault.
The girls that waited at table saw that he did not distinguish in manner
between them and the girls whom they served. The knot between his brows
did not dissolve in the smiling gratitude of the young ladies whom he
preceded to their places, and pulled out their chairs for, any more than
in the blandishments of a waitress who thanked him for some correction.
They owned when he had been harshest that no one could be kinder if he
saw a girl really trying, or more patient with well meaning stupidity,
but some things fretted him, and he was as apt to correct a girl in her
grammar as in her table service. Out of work hours, if he met any of
them, he recognized them with deferential politeness; but he shunned
occasions of encounter with them as distinctly as he avoided the ladies
among the hotel guests. Some of the table girls pitied his loneliness,
and once they proposed that he should read to them on the back piazza in
the leisure of their mid-afternoons. He said that he had to keep up with
his studies in all the time he could get; he treated their request with
grave civility, but they felt his refusal to be final.
He was seen very little about the house outside of his own place and
function, and he was scarcely known to consort with anyone but Fane, who
celebrated his high sense of the honor to the lady-guests; but if any of
these would have been willing to show Gregory that they considered his
work to get an education as something that redeemed itself from discredit
through the nobility of its object, he gave them no chance to do so.
The afternoon following their talk about Clementina, Gregory looked in
for Fane behind the letter boxes, but did not find him, and the girl
herself came round from the front to say that he was out buying, but
would be back now, very soon; it was occasionally the clerk's business to
forage among the farmers for the lighter supplies, such as eggs, and
butter, and poultry, and this was the buying that Clementina meant. "Very
well, I'll wait here for him a little while," Gregory answered.
"So do," said Clementina, in a formula which she thought polite; but she
saw the frown with which Gregory took a Greek book from his pocket, and
she hurried round in front of the boxes again, wondering how she could
have displeased him. She put her face in sight a moment to explain, "I
have got to be here and give out the lettas till Mr. Fane gets back," and
then withdrew it. He tried to lose himself in his book, but her tender
voice spoke from time to time beyond the boxes, and Gregory kept
listening for Clementina to say, "No'm, there a'n't. Perhaps, the'e'll be
something the next mail," and "Yes'm, he'e's one, and I guess this paper
is for some of youa folks, too."
Gregory shut his book with a sudden bang at last and jumped to his feet,
to go away.
The girl came running round the corner of the boxes. "Oh! I thought
something had happened."
"No, nothing has happened," said Gregory, with a sort of violence; which
was heightened by a sense of the rings and tendrils of loose hair
springing from the mass that defined her pretty head. "Don't you know
that you oughtn't to say 'No'm' and 'Yes'm?"' he demanded, bitterly, and
then he expected to see the water come into her eyes, or the fire into
her cheeks.
Clementina merely looked interested. "Did I say that? I meant to say Yes,
ma'am and No, ma'am; but I keep forgetting."
"You oughtn't to say anything!" Gregory answered savagely, "Just say Yes,
and No, and let your voice do the rest."
"Oh!" said the girl, with the gentlest abeyance, as if charmed with the
novelty of the idea. "I should be afraid it wasn't polite."
Gregory took an even brutal tone. It seemed to him as if he were forced
to hurt her feelings. But his words, in spite of his tone, were not
brutal; they might have even been thought flattering. "The politeness is
in the manner, and you don't need anything but your manner."
"Do you think so, truly?" asked the girl joyously. "I should like to try
it once!"