AN ELEEMOSYNARY INSTITUTION
One night during the latter part of July Betty had a birthday, and
according to immemorial custom Caroline and Nancy and Dick and Billy
helped her to celebrate it at one of the old-fashioned down-town
hotels where they had ordered practically the same dinner for her
anniversaries ever since they had been grown up enough to celebrate
them unchaperoned. Caroline's brother, Preston, had made a sixth
member of the party for the first two or three years, but he had been
located in London since then, in charge of the English office of his
firm, to which he had been suddenly appointed a month after he and
Betty, who had been sweethearts, had had a spectacular quarrel.
Nancy stayed by the celebration until about half past nine, and
then Dick put her into a taxi-cab, and she fled back to her
responsibilities as mistress of Outside Inn, agreeing to meet the
others later for the rounding out of the evening. As she drew up
before the big gate the courtyard seemed practically deserted. The
waitresses were busy clearing away the few cluttered tables left
by the last late guests, and in one sheltered corner a man and a girl
were frankly holding hands across the table, while they whispered
earnestly of some impending parting. The big canopy of striped awning
cloth had been drawn over the tables, as the rather heavy air of
the evening bad been punctured occasionally by a swift scattering
of rain. Nancy was half-way across the court before she realized
that Collier Pratt was still occupying his accustomed seat under the
shadow of the big Venus. She had not seen him face to face or
communicated with him since the day she had looked him up in the
telephone book and sent his cape to him by special messenger. She
stopped involuntarily as she reached his side, and he looked up and
smiled as he recognized her.
"You're late again, Miss Ann Martin," he said, rising and pulling out
a chair for her opposite his own. "I think perhaps I can pull the
wires and procure you some sustenance if you will say the word."
"I've no word to say," Nancy said, "but how do you do? I've just
dined elsewhere. I only stopped in here for a moment to get
something--something I left here at lunch."
"In that case I'll offer you a drop of Michael's tea in my water
glass." He poured a tablespoonful or so of claret from the teapot into
the glass of ice-water before him, and added several lumps of sugar to
the concoction, which he stirred gravely for some time before he
offered it to her. "I never touch water myself. This is _eau rougie_
as the French children drink it. It's really better for you than
ice-cream and a glass of water."
"And less American," Nancy murmured with her eyes down.
"And less American," he acquiesced blandly.
Nancy sipped her drink, and Collier Pratt stirred the dregs in his
coffee cup--Nancy had overheard some of her patrons remarking on the
curious habits of a man who consumed a pot of tea and a pot of coffee
at one and the same meal--and they regarded each other for some time
in silence. Michael and Hildeguard, Molly and Dolly and two others of
the staff of girls were grouped in the doorway exactly in Nancy's
range of vision, and whispering to one another excitedly concerning
the phenomenon that met their eyes.
"The little girl?" Nancy said, trying to ignore the composite scrutiny
to which she was being subjected, by turning determinedly to her
companion, "the little girl that you spoke of--is she well?"
"She's as well as a motherless baby could be, subjected to the
irregularities of a life like mine. Still she seems to thrive on it."
"Is she yours?" Nancy asked.
"Yes, she's mine," Collier Pratt said, gravely dismissing the subject,
and leaving Nancy half ashamed of her boldness in putting the
question, half possessed of a madness to know the answer at any cost.
"I've discovered something very interesting," Collier Pratt said,
after an interval in which Nancy felt that he was perfectly cognizant
of her struggle with her curiosity; "in fact, it's one of the most
interesting discoveries that I have made in the course of a not
unadventurous life. Do you come to this restaurant often?"
"Quite often," Nancy equivocated, "earlier in the day. For luncheon
and for tea."
"I come here almost every night of my life," Collier Pratt declared,
"and I intend to continue to come so long as _le bon Dieu_ spares me
my health and my epicurean taste. You know that I spoke of the food
here before. The character of it has changed entirely. It's
unmistakably French now, not to say Parisian. Outside of Paris or
Vienna I have never tasted such soups, such sauce, such delicate and
suggestive flavors. My entire existence has been revolutionized by the
experience. I am no longer the lonely and unhappy man you discovered
at this gate a short month ago. I can not cavil at an America that
furnishes me with such food as I get in this place.
"Man may live without friends, and may live without books.
But civilized man can not live without cooks,"
Nancy quoted sententiously.
"Exactly. The whole point is that the cooking here is civilized. Oh!
you ought to come here to dinner, my friend. I don't know what the
luncheons and teas are like--"
"They're very good," Nancy said.
"But not like the dinners, I'll wager. The dinners are the very last
word! I don't know why this place isn't famous. Of course, I do my
best to keep it a secret from the artistic rabble I know. It would be
overrun with them in a week, and its character utterly ruined."
"I wonder if it would."
"Oh! I'm sure of it."
"What is your discovery?" Nancy asked.
Collier Pratt leaned dramatically closer to her, and Nancy instinctively
bent forward across the tiny table until her face was very near to his.
"Do you know anything about the price of foodstuffs?" he demanded.
"A little," Nancy admitted.
"You know then that the price of every commodity has soared
unthinkably high, that the mere problem of providing the ordinary
commonplace meal at the ordinary commonplace restaurant has become
almost unsolvable to the proprietors? Most of the eating places in New
York are run at a loss, while the management is marking time and
praying for a change in conditions. Well, here we have a restaurant
opening at the most crucial period in the history of such enterprises,
offering its patrons the delicacies of the season most exquisitely
cooked, at what is practically the minimum price for a respectable
meal."
"That's true, isn't it?"
"More than that, there are people who come here, who order one thing
and get another, and the thing they get is always a much more
elaborate and extravagant dish than the one they asked for. I've seen
that happen again and again."
"Have you?" Nancy asked faintly, shrinking a little beneath the
intentness of his look. "How--how do you account for it?"
"There's only one way to account for it."
"Do you think that there is an--an unlimited amount of capital behind
it?"
"I think that goes without saying," he said; "there must be an
unlimited amount of capital behind it, or it wouldn't continue to
flourish like a green bay tree; but that's not in the nature of a
discovery. Anybody with any power of observation at all would have
come to that conclusion long since."
"Then, what is it you have found out?" Nancy asked, quaking.
"My discovery is--" Collier Pratt paused for the whole effect of his
revelation to penetrate to her consciousness, "that this whole outfit
is run _philanthropically_."
"Philanthropically?"
"Don't you see? There can't be any other explanation of it. It's an
eleemosynary institution. That's what it is."
Nancy met his expectant eyes with a trifle of wildness in her own, but
he continued to hold her gaze triumphantly.
"Don't you see," he repeated, "doesn't everything point to that as the
only possible explanation? It's some rich woman's plaything. That
accounts for the food, the setting,--everything in fact that has
puzzled us. Amateur,--that's the word; effective, delightful but
inexperienced. It sticks out all over the place."
"The food isn't amateur," Nancy said, a little resentfully.
"Nothing is amateur but the spirit behind it, through which we profit.
Don't you see?"
"I'm beginning to see," Nancy admitted, "perhaps you are right. I
guess the place is run philanthropically. I--I hadn't quite realized
it before."
"What did you think?"
"I knew that the--one who was running it wasn't quite sure where she
was coming out, but I didn't think of it is an eleemosynary
institution."
"Of course, it is."
"It's an unscrupulous sort of charity, then," Nancy mused, "if it's
masquerading as self-respecting and self-supporting. I--I've never
approved of things like that."
"Why quarrel with a scheme so beneficent?"
"Don't you care?" Nancy asked with a catch in her voice that was very
like an appeal.
He shook his head.
"Why should I?" he smiled.
"Then I don't care, either," she decided with an emphasis that was
entirely lost on the man on the other side of the table.