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.”
Gregory twitched irascibly. “I don't want to marry them.”
“Pretty cheap lot, you mean? Well, I don't know.”
“I don't mean that,” retorted the student. “But I've got other things to
think of.”
“Don't you believe,” the clerk modestly urged, “that it is natural for a
man--well, a young man--to think about girls?”
“I suppose it is.”
“And you don't consider it wrong?”
“How, wrong?”
“Well, a waste of time. I don't know as I always think about wanting to
marry 'em, or be in love, but I like to let my mind run on 'em. There's
something about a girl that, well, you don't know what it is, exactly.
Take almost any of 'em,” said the clerk, with an air of inductive
reasoning. “Take that Claxon girl, now for example, I don't know what
it is about her. She's good-looking, I don't deny that; and she's got
pretty manners, and she's as graceful as a bird. But it a'n't any one of
'em, and it don't seem to be all of 'em put together that makes you
want to keep your eyes on her the whole while. Ever noticed what a nice
little foot she's got? Or her hands?”
“No,” said the student.
“I don't mean that she ever tries to show them off; though I know some
girls that would. But she's not that kind. She ain't much more than a
child, and yet you got to treat her just like a woman. Noticed the kind
of way she's got?”
“No,” said the student, with impatience.
The clerk mused with a plaintive air for a moment before he spoke.
“Well, it's something as if she'd been trained to it, so that she knew
just the right thing to do, every time, and yet I guess it's nature. You
know how the chef always calls her the Boss? That explains it about as
well as anything, and I presume that's what my mind was running on, the
other day, when I called her Boss. But, my! I can't get anywhere near
her since!”
“It serves you right,” said Gregory. “You had no business to tease her.”
“Now, do you think it was teasing? I did, at first, and then again it
seemed to me that I came out with the word because it seemed the right
one. I presume I couldn't explain that to her.”
“It wouldn't be easy.”
“I look upon her,” said Fane, with an effect of argument in the
sweetness of his smile, “just as I would upon any other young lady in
the house. Do you spell apology with one p or two?”
“One,” said the student, and the clerk made a minute on a piece of
paper.
“I feel badly for the girl. I don't want her to think I was teasing her
or taking any sort of liberty with her. Now, would you apologize to her,
if you was in my place, and would you write a note, or just wait your
chance and speak to her?”
Gregory got down from his stool with a disdainful laugh, and went out of
the place. “You make me sick, Fane,” he said.
The last dance was over, and the young ladies who had been waltzing with
one another, came out of the parlor with gay cries and laughter, like
summer girls who had been at a brilliant hop, and began to stray down
the piazzas, and storm into the office. Several of them fluttered up to
the desk, as the clerk had foretold, and looked for letters in the boxes
bearing their initials. They called him out, and asked if he had not
forgotten something for them. He denied it with a sad, wise smile, and
then they tried to provoke him to a belated flirtation, in lack of other
material, but he met their overtures discreetly, and they presently
said, Well, they guessed they must go; and went. Fane turned to
encounter Gregory, who had come in by a side door.
“Fane, I want to beg your pardon. I was rude to you just now.”
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” the clerk protested. “That's all right. Sit down a
while, can't you, and talk with a fellow. It's early, yet.”
“No, I can't. I just wanted to say I was sorry I spoke in that way.
Good-night. Is there anything in particular?”
“No; good-night. I was just wondering about--that girl.”
“Oh!”