"Do I eat as though I was starved?"
"You--you look tired, Nance."
"Well," I said slowly, "it's been a hard week."
"It's been hard for me, too; harder, I think, than for you. It wasn't
fair to me to let me--think what I did and say what I did. I'm so
sorry, Nance,--and ashamed. So ashamed! You might have told me."
"And have you put your foot down on the whole thing; not much!"
He laughed. He's got such a boyish laugh in spite of his chin and his
eye-glasses and the bigness of him. He filled my glass for me and
helped me again to the salad.
Oh, Mag, it's such fun to be a woman and have a man wait on you like
that! It's such fun to be hungry and to sit down to a jolly little
table just big enough for two, with carnations nodding in the tall slim
vase, with a fat, soft-footed, quick-handed waiter dancing behind you,
and something tempting in every dish your eye falls on.
It's a gay, happy, easy world, Maggie darlin'. I vow I can't find a
dark corner in it--not to-day.
None but the swellest place in town was good enough, Obermuller had
said, for us to celebrate in. The waiters looked queerly at us when we
came in--me in my dusty shoes and mussed hair and old rig, and Mr. O.
in his working togs. But do you suppose we cared?
He was smoking and I was pretending to eat fruit when at last I got
fairly launched on my story.
He listened to it all with never a word of interruption. Sometimes I
thought he was so interested that he couldn't bear to miss a word I
said. And then again I fancied he wasn't listening at all to me; only
watching me and listening to something inside of himself.
Can you see him, Mag, sitting opposite me there at the pretty little
table, off in a private room by ourselves? He looked so big and strong
and masterful, with his eyes half closed, watching me, that I hugged
myself with delight to think that I--I, Nancy Olden, had done something
for him he couldn't do for himself.
It made me so proud, so tipsily vain, that as I leaned forward eagerly
talking, I felt that same intoxicating happiness I get on the stage
when the audience is all with me, and the two of us--myself and the
many-handed, good-natured other fellow over on the other side of the
footlights--go careering off on a jaunt of fun and fancy, like two good
playmates.
He was silent a minute when I got through. Then he laid his cigar
aside and stretched out his hand to me.
"And the reason, Nance--the reason for it all?"