When he took possession of his hall bedroom the next day and came down
to his first meal, all the boarders looked at him interestedly. They had
heard of the G. Destroyer from Mrs. Bowse, whose grippe had disappeared.
Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger looked at him because they were about
his own age, and shared a hall bedroom on his floor; the young woman
from the notion counter in a down-town department store looked at him
because she was a young woman; the rest of the company looked at him
because a young man in a hall bedroom might or might not be noisy
or objectionable, and the incident of the G. Destroyer sounded
good-natured. Mr. Joseph Hutchinson, the stout and discontented
Englishman from Manchester, looked him over because the mere fact that
he was a new-comer had placed him by his own rash act in the position of
a target for criticism. Mr. Hutchinson had come to New York because he
had been told that he could find backers among profuse and innumerable
multi-millionaires for the invention which had been the haunting vision
of his uninspiring life. He had not been met with the careless
rapture which had been described to him, and he was becoming violently
antagonistic to American capital and pessimistic in his views of
American institutions. Like Tembarom's father, he was the resentful
Englishman.
“I don't think much o' that chap,” he said in what he considered an
undertone to his daughter, who sat beside him and tried to manage that
he should not be infuriated by waiting for butter and bread and second
helpings. A fine, healthy old feudal feeling that servants should be
roared at if they did not “look sharp” when he wanted anything was one
of his salient characteristics.
“Wait a bit, Father; we don't know anything about him yet,” Ann
Hutchinson murmured quietly, hoping that his words had been lost in the
clatter of knives and forks and dishes.
As Tembarom had taken his seat, he had found that, when he looked across
the table, he looked directly at Miss Hutchinson; and before the meal
ended he felt that he was in great good luck to be placed opposite an
object of such singular interest. He knew nothing about “types,” but if
he had been of those who do, he would probably have said to himself that
she was of a type apart. As it was, he merely felt that she was of a
kind one kept looking at whether one ought to or not. She was a little
thing of that exceedingly light slimness of build which makes a girl a
childish feather-weight. Few girls retain it after fourteen or fifteen.
A wind might supposably have blown her away, but one knew it would not,
because she was firm and steady on her small feet. Ordinary strength
could have lifted her with one hand, and would have been tempted to do
it. She had a slim, round throat, and the English daisy face it upheld
caused it to suggest to the mind the stem of a flower. The roundness of
her cheek, in and out of which totally unexpected dimples flickered,
and the forget-me-not blueness of her eyes, which were large and rather
round also, made her look like a nice baby of singularly serious and
observing mind. She looked at one as certain awe-inspiring things in
perambulators look at one--with a far and clear silence of gaze which
passes beyond earthly obstacles and reserves a benign patience with
follies. Tembarom felt interestedly that one really might quail before
it, if one had anything of an inferior quality to hide. And yet it was
not a critical gaze at all. She wore a black dress with a bit of white
collar, and she had so much soft, red hair that he could not help
recalling one or two women who owned the same quantity and seemed able
to carry it only as a sort of untidy bundle. Hers looked entirely under
control, and yet was such a wonder of burnished fullness that it tempted
the hand to reach out and touch it. It became Tembarom's task during the
meal to keep his eyes from turning too often toward it and its owner.
If she had been a girl who took things hard, she might have taken her
father very hard indeed. But opinions and feelings being solely a matter
of points of view, she was very fond of him, and, regarding him as
a sacred charge and duty, took care of him as though she had been a
reverentially inclined mother taking care of a boisterous son. When his
roar was heard, her calm little voice always fell quietly on indignant
ears the moment it ceased. It was her part in life to act as a
palliative: her mother, whose well-trained attitude toward the ruling
domestic male was of the early Victorian order, had lived and died one.
A nicer, warmer little woman had never existed. Joseph Hutchinson had
adored and depended on her as much as he had harried her. When he had
charged about like a mad bull because he could not button his collar, or
find the pipe he had mislaid in his own pocket, she had never said more
than “Now, Mr. Hutchinson,” or done more than leave her sewing to button
the collar with soothing fingers, and suggest quietly that sometimes he
DID chance to carry his pipe about with him. She was of the class which
used to call its husband by a respectful surname. When she died she left
him as a sort of legacy to her daughter, spending the last weeks of her
life in explaining affectionately all that “Father” needed to keep him
quiet and make him comfortable.
Little Ann had never forgotten a detail, and had even improved upon
some of them, as she happened to be cleverer than her mother, and had,
indeed, a far-seeing and clear young mind of her own. She had been
called “Little Ann” all her life. This had held in the first place
because her mother's name had been Ann also, and after her mother's
death the diminutive had not fallen away from her. People felt it
belonged to her not because she was especially little, though she was a
small, light person, but because there was an affectionate humor in the
sound of it.
Despite her hard needs, Mrs. Bowse would have faced the chance of losing
two boarders rather than have kept Mr. Joseph Hutchinson but for Little
Ann. As it was, she kept them both, and in the course of three months
the girl was Little Ann to almost every one in the house. Her normalness
took the form of an instinct which amounted to genius for seeing what
people ought to have, and in some occult way filling in bare or trying
places.
“She's just a wonder, that girl,” Mrs. Bowse said to one boarder after
another.
“She's just a wonder,” Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger murmured to
each other in rueful confidence, as they tilted their chairs against
the wall of their hall bedroom and smoked. Each of the shabby and
poverty-stricken young men had of course fallen hopelessly in love with
her at once. This was merely human and inevitable, but realizing in
the course of a few weeks that she was too busy taking care of her
irritable, boisterous old Manchester father, and everybody else, to have
time to be made love to even by young men who could buy new boots when
the old ones had ceased to be water-tight, they were obliged to resign
themselves to the, after all, comforting fact that she became a mother
to them, not a sister. She mended their socks and sewed buttons on for
them with a firm frankness which could not be persuaded into meaning
anything more sentimental than a fixed habit of repairing anything which
needed it, and which, while at first bewildering in its serenity, ended
by reducing the two youths to a dust of devotion.
“She's a wonder, she is,” they sighed when at every weekend they found
their forlorn and scanty washing resting tidily on their bed.
In the course of a week, more or less, Tembarom's feeling for her would
have been exactly that of his two hall-bedroom neighbors, but that his
nature, though a practical one, was not inclined to any supine degree of
resignation. He was a sensible youth, however, and gave no trouble. Even
Joseph Hutchinson, who of course resented furiously any “nonsense” of
which his daughter and possession was the object, became sufficiently
mollified by his good spirits and ready good nature to refrain from open
conversational assault.
“I don't mind that chap as much as I did at first,” he admitted
reluctantly to Little Ann one evening after a good dinner and a
comfortable pipe. “He's not such a fool as he looks.”
Tembarom was given, as Little Ann was, to seeing what people wanted. He
knew when to pass the mustard and other straying condiments. He picked
up things which dropped inconveniently, he did not interrupt the remarks
of his elders and betters, and several times when he chanced to be
in the hall, and saw Mr. Hutchinson, in irritable, stout Englishman
fashion, struggling into his overcoat, he sprang forward with a light,
friendly air and helped him. 'He did not do it with ostentatious
politeness or with the manner of active youth giving generous aid to
elderly avoirdupois. He did it as though it occurred to him as a natural
result of being on the spot.
It took Mrs. Bowse and her boarding-house less than a week definitely
to like him. Every night when he sat down to dinner he brought news with
him-news and jokes and new slang. Newspaper-office anecdote and talk
gave a journalistic air to the gathering when he was present, and there
was novelty in it. Soon every one was intimate with him, and interested
in what he was doing. Galton's good-natured patronage of him was a thing
to which no one was indifferent. It was felt to be the right thing in
the right place. When he came home at night it became the custom to ask
him questions as to the bits of luck which befell him. He became
“T. T.” instead of Mr. Tembarom, except to Joseph Hutchinson and his
'daughter. Hutchinson called him Tembarom, but Little Ann said “Mr.
Tembarom” with quaint frequency when she spoke to him.
“Landed anything to-day, T. T.?” some one would ask almost every
evening, and the interest in his relation of the day's adventures
increased from week to week. Little Ann never asked questions and seldom
made comments, but she always listened attentively. She had gathered,
and guessed from what she had gathered, a rather definite idea of what
his hard young life had been. He did not tell pathetic stories about
himself, but he and Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger had become fast
friends, and the genial smoking of cheap tobacco in hall bedrooms tends
to frankness of relation, and the various ways in which each had found
himself “up against it” in the course of their brief years supplied
material for anecdotal talk.
“But it's bound to be easier from now on,” he would say. “I've got the
'short' down pretty fine--not fine enough to make big money, but enough
to hold down a job with Galton. He's mighty good to me. If I knew more,
I believe he'd give me a column to take care of--Up-town Society column
perhaps. A fellow named Biker's got it. Twenty per. Goes on a bust twice
a month, the fool. Gee! I wish I had his job!”
Mrs. Bowse's house was provided with a parlor in which her boarders
could sit in the evening when so inclined. It was a fearsome room,
which, when the dark, high-ceilinged hall was entered, revealed depths
of dingy gloom which appeared splashed in spots with incongruous
brilliancy of color. This effect was produced by richly framed
department-store chromo lithographs on the walls, aided by lurid
cushion-covers, or “tidies” representing Indian maidens or chieftains
in full war paint, or clusters of poppies of great boldness of hue.
They had either been Christmas gifts bestowed upon Mrs. Bowse or
department-store bargains of her own selection, purchased with thrifty
intent. The red-and-green plush upholstered walnut chairs arid sofa had
been acquired by her when the bankruptcy of a neighboring boarding-house
brought them within her means. They were no longer very red or very
green, and the cheerfully hopeful design of the tidies and cushions had
been to conceal worn places and stains. The mantelpiece was adorned by a
black-walnut-and-gold-framed mirror, and innumerable vases of the ornate
ninety-eight-cents order. The centerpiece held a large and extremely
soiled spray of artificial wistaria. The end of the room was rendered
attractive by a tent-like cozy-corner built of savage weapons and
Oriental cotton stuffs long ago become stringy and almost leprous in
hue. The proprietor of the bankrupt boarding-house had been “artistic.”
But Mrs. Bowse was a good-enough soul whose boarders liked her and her
house, and when the gas was lighted and some one played “rag-time” on
the second-hand pianola, they liked the parlor.
Little Ann did not often appear in it, but now and then she came down
with her bit of sewing,--she always had a “bit of sewing,”--and she sat
in the cozy-corner listening to the talk or letting some one confide
troubles to her. Sometimes it was the New England widow, Mrs. Peck, who
looked like a spinster school-ma'am, but who had a married son with a
nice wife who lived in Harlem and drank heavily. She used to consult
with Little Ann as to the possible wisdom of putting a drink deterrent
privately in his tea. Sometimes it was Mr. Jakes, a depressed little
man whose wife had left him, for no special reason he could discover.
Oftenest perhaps it was Julius Steinberger or Jim Bowles who did
their ingenuous best to present themselves to her as energetic, if not
successful, young business men, not wholly unworthy of attention and
always breathing daily increasing devotion. Sometimes it was Tembarom,
of whom her opinion had never been expressed, but who seemed to have
made friends with her. She liked to hear about the newspaper office and
Mr. Galton, and never was uninterested in his hopes of “making good.”
She seemed to him the wisest and most direct and composed person he had
ever known. She spoke with the broad, flat, friendly Manchester accent,
and when she let drop a suggestion, it carried a delightfully sober
conviction with it, because what she said was generally a revelation of
logical mental argument concerning details she had gathered through her
little way of listening and saying nothing whatever.
“If Mr. Biker drinks, he won't keep his place,” she said to Tembarom one
night. “Perhaps you might get it yourself, if you persevere.”
Tembarom reddened a little. He really reddened through joyous
excitement.
“Say, I didn't know you knew a thing about that,” he answered. “You're
a regular wonder. You scarcely ever say anything, but the way you get on
to things gets me.”
“Perhaps if I talked more I shouldn't notice as much,” she said, turning
her bit of sewing round and examining it. “I never was much of a talker.
Father's a good talker, and Mother and me got into the way of listening.
You do if you live with a good talker.”
Tembarom looked at the girl with a male gentleness, endeavoring to
subdue open expression of the fact that he was convinced that she was as
thoroughly aware of her father's salient characteristics as she was of
other things.
“You do,” said Tembarom. Then picking up her scissors, which had dropped
from her lap, and politely returning them, he added anxiously: “To think
of you remembering Biker! I wonder, if I ever did get his job, if I
could hold it down?”
“Yes,” decided Little Ann; “you could. I've noticed you're that kind of
person, Mr. Tembarom.”
“Have you?” he said elatedly. “Say, honest Injun?”
“Yes.”
“I shall be getting stuck on myself if you encourage me like that,”
he said, and then, his face falling, he added, “Biker graduated at
Princeton.”
“I don't know much about society,” Little Ann remarked,--“I never saw
any either up-town or down-town or in the country,--but I shouldn't
think you'd have to have a college education to write the things you see
about it in the newspaper paragraphs.”
Tembarom grinned.
“They're not real high-brow stuff, are they,” he said. “'There was
a brilliant gathering on Tuesday evening at the house of Mr. Jacob
Sturtburger at 79 Two Hundredth Street on the occasion of the marriage
of his daughter Miss Rachel Sturtburger to Mr. Eichenstein. The bride
was attired in white peau de cygne trimmed with duchess lace.'”
Little Ann took him up. “I don't know what peau de cygne is, and I
daresay the bride doesn't. I've never been to anything but a village
school, but I could make up paragraphs like that myself.”
“That's the up-town kind,” said Tembarom. “The down-town ones wear
their mothers' point-lace wedding-veils some-times, but they're not much
different. Say, I believe I could do it if I had luck.”
“So do I,” returned Little Ann.
Tembarom looked down at the carpet, thinking the thing over. Ann went on
sewing.
“That's the way with you,” he said presently: “you put things into a
fellow's head. You've given me a regular boost, Little Ann.”
It is not unlikely that but for the sensible conviction in her voice he
would have felt less bold when, two weeks later, Biker, having gone upon
a “bust” too prolonged, was dismissed with-out benefit of clergy, and
Galton desperately turned to Tembarom with anxious question in his eye.
“Do you think you could take this job?” he said.
Tembarom's heart, as he believed at the time, jumped into his throat.
“What do you think, Mr. Galton?” he asked.
“It isn't a thing to think about,” was Galton's answer. “It's a thing I
must be sure of.”
“Well,” said Tembarom, “if you give it to me, I'll put up a mighty hard
fight before I fall down.”
Galton considered him, scrutinizing keenly his tough, long-built body,
his sharp, eager, boyish face, and especially his companionable grin.
“We'll let it go at that,” he decided. “You'll make friends up in
Harlem, and you won't find it hard to pick up news. We can at least try
it.”
Tembarom's heart jumped into his throat again, and he swallowed it once
more. He was glad he was not holding his hat in his hand because he knew
he would have forgotten himself and thrown it up into the air.
“Thank you, Mr. Galton,” he said, flushing tremendously. “I'd like to
tell you how I appreciate your trusting me, but I don't know how. Thank
you, sir.”
When he appeared in Mrs. Bowse's dining-room that evening there was a
glow of elation about him and a swing in his entry which attracted all
eyes at once. For some unknown reason everybody looked at him, and,
meeting his eyes, detected the presence of some new exultation.
“Landed anything, T. T.?” Jim Bowles cried out. “You look it.”
“Sure I look it,” Tembarom answered, taking his napkin out of its
ring with an unconscious flourish. “I've landed the up-town society
page--landed it, by gee!”
A good-humored chorus of ejaculatory congratulation broke forth all
round the table.
“Good business!” “Three cheers for T. T.!” “Glad of it!” “Here's luck!”
said one after another.
They were all pleased, and it was generally felt that Galton had shown
sense and done the right thing again. Even Mr. Hutchinson rolled about
in his chair and grunted his approval.
After dinner Tembarom, Jim Bowles, and Julius Steinberger went
upstairs stairs together and filled the hall bedroom with clouds of
tobacco-smoke, tilting their chairs against the wall, smoking their
pipes furiously, flushed and talkative, working themselves up with the
exhilarated plannings of youth. Jim Bowles and Julius had been down on
their luck for several weeks, and that “good old T. T.” should come in
with this fairy-story was an actual stimulus. If you have never in your
life been able to earn more than will pay for your food and lodging,
twenty dollars looms up large. It might be the beginning of anything.
“First thing is to get on to the way to do it,” argued Tembarom. “I
don't know the first thing. I've got to think it out. I couldn't ask
Biker. He wouldn't tell me, anyhow.”
“He's pretty mad, I guess,” said Steinberger.
“Mad as hops,” Tembarom answered. “As I was coming down-stairs from
Galton's room he was standing in the hall talking to Miss Dooley, and
he said: `That Tembarom fellow's going to do it! He doesn't know how to
spell. I should like to see his stuff come in.' He said it loud, because
he wanted me to hear it, and he sort of laughed through his nose.”
“Say, T. T., can you spell?” Jim inquired thoughtfully.
“Spell? Me? No,” Tembarom owned with unshaken good cheer. “What I've got
to do is to get a tame dictionary and keep it chained to the leg of my
table. Those words with two m's or two l's in them get me right down on
the mat. But the thing that looks biggest to me is how to find out where
the news is, and the name of the fellow that'll put me on to it. You
can't go up a man's front steps and ring the bell and ask him if he's
going to be married or buried or have a pink tea.”
“Wasn't that a knock at the door?” said Steinberger.
It was a knock, and Tembarom jumped up and threw the door open, thinking
Mrs. Bowse might have come on some household errand. But it was Little
Ann Hutchinson instead of Mrs. Bowse, and there was a threaded needle
stuck into the front of her dress, and she had on a thimble.
“I want Mr. Bowles's new socks,” she said maternally. “I promised I'd
mark them for him.”
Bowles and Steinberger sprang from their chairs, and came forward in the
usual comfortable glow of pleasure at sight of her.
“What do you think of that for all the comforts of a home?” said
Tembarom. “As if it wasn't enough for a man to have new socks without
having marks put on them! What are your old socks made of anyhow--solid
gold? Burglars ain't going to break in and steal them.”
“They won't when I've marked them, Mr. Tembarom,” answered Little Ann,
looking up at him with sober, round, for-get-me-not blue eyes, but with
a deep dimple breaking out near her lip; “but all three pairs would not
come home from the wash if I didn't.”
“Three pairs!” ejaculated Tembarom. “He's got three pairs of socks! New?
That's what's been the matter with him for the last week. Don't you mark
them for him, Little Ann. 'Tain't good for a man to have everything.”
“Here they are,” said Jim, bringing them forward. “Twenty-five marked
down to ten at Tracy's. Are they pretty good?”
Little Ann looked them over with the practised eye of a connoisseur of
bargains.
“They'd be about a shilling in Manchester shops,” she decided, “and they
might be put down to sixpence. They're good enough to take care of.”
She was not the young woman who is ready for prolonged lively
conversation in halls and at bedroom doors, and she had turned away with
the new socks in her hand when Tembarom, suddenly inspired, darted after
her.
“Say, I've just thought of something,” he exclaimed eagerly. “It's
something I want to ask you.”
“What is it?”
“It's about the society-page lay-out.” He hesitated. “I wonder if it'd
be rushing you too much if--say,” he suddenly broke off, and standing
with his hands in his pockets, looked down at her with anxious
admiration, “I believe you just know about everything.”
“No, I don't, Mr. Tembarom; but I'm very glad about the page.
Everybody's glad.”
One of the chief difficulties Tembarom found facing him when he talked
to Little Ann was the difficulty of resisting an awful temptation to
take hold of her--to clutch her to his healthy, tumultuous young breast
and hold her there firmly. He was half ashamed of himself when he
realized it, but he knew that his venial weakness was shared by Jim
Bowles and Steinberger and probably others. She was so slim and light
and soft, and the serious frankness of her eyes and the quaint air of
being a sort of grown-up child of astonishing intelligence produced an
effect it was necessary to combat with.
“What I wanted to say,” he put it to her, “was that I believe if you'd
just let me talk this thing out to you it'd do me good. I believe you'd
help me to get somewhere. I've got to fix up a scheme for getting next
the people who have things happening to them that I can make society
stuff out of, you know. Biker didn't make a hit of it, but, gee! I've
just got to. I've got to.”
“Yes,” answered Little Ann, her eyes fixed on him thoughtfully; “you've
got to, Mr. Tembarom.”
“There's not a soul in the parlor. Would you mind coming down and
sitting there while I talk at you and try to work things out? You could
go on with your marking.”
She thought it over a minute.
“I'll do it if Father can spare me,” she made up her mind. “I'll go and
ask him.”
She went to ask him, and returned in two or three minutes with her small
sewing-basket in her hand.
“He can spare me,” she said. “He's reading his paper, and doesn't want
to talk.”
They went down-stairs together and found the room empty. Tembarom turned
up the lowered gas, and Little Ann sat down in the cozy-corner with her
work-basket on her knee. Tembarom drew up a chair and sat down opposite
to her. She threaded a needle and took up one of Jim's new socks.
“Now,” she said.
“It's like this,” he explained. “The page is a new deal, anyhow. There
didn't used to be an up-town society column at all. It was all Fifth
Avenue and the four hundred; but ours isn't a fashionable paper, and
their four hundred ain't going to buy it to read their names in it.
They'd rather pay to keep out of it. Uptown's growing like smoke, and
there's lots of people up that way that'd like their friends to read
about their weddings and receptions, and would buy a dozen copies to
send away when their names were in. There's no end of women and girls
that'd like to see their clothes described and let their friends read
the descriptions. They'd buy the paper, too, you bet. It'll be a big
circulation-increaser. It's Galton's idea, and he gave the job to Biker
because he thought an educated fellow could get hold of people. But
somehow he couldn't. Seems as if they didn't like him. He kept getting
turned down. The page has been mighty poor--no pictures of brides or
anything. Galton's been sick over it. He'd been sure it'd make a hit.
Then Biker's always drinking more or less, and he's got the swell head,
anyhow. I believe that's the reason he couldn't make good with the
up-towners.”
“Perhaps he was too well educated, Mr. Tembarom,” said Little Ann. She
was marking a letter J in red cotton, and her outward attention was
apparently wholly fixed on her work.
“Say, now,” Tembarom broke out, “there's where you come in. You go on
working as if there was nothing but that sock in New York, but I guess
you've just hit the dot. Perhaps that was it. He wanted to do Fifth
Avenue work anyway, and he didn't go at Harlem right. He put on
Princeton airs when he asked questions. Gee! a fellow can't put on any
kind of airs when he's the one that's got to ask.”
“You'll get on better,” remarked Little Ann. “You've got a friendly way
and you've a lot of sense. I've noticed it.”
Her head was bent over the red J and she still looked at it and not at
Tembarom. This was not coyness, but simple, calm absorption. If she had
not been making the J, she would have sat with her hands folded in her
lap, and gazed at the young man with undisturbed attention.
“Have you?” said Tembarom, gratefully. “That gives me another
boost, Little Ann. What a man seems to need most is just plain
twenty-cents-a-yard sense. Not that I ever thought I had the dollar
kind. I'm not putting on airs.”
“Mr. Galton knows the kind you have. I suppose that's why he gave you
the page.” The words, spoken in the shrewd-sounding Manchester accent,
were neither flattering nor unflattering; they were merely impartial.
“Well, now I've got it, I can't fall down,” said Tembarom. “I've got
to find out for myself how to get next to the people I want to talk to.
I've got to find out who to get next to.”
Little Ann put in the final red stitch of the letter J and laid the sock
neatly folded on the basket.
“I've just been thinking something, Mr. Tembarom,” she said. “Who makes
the wedding-cakes?”
He gave a delighted start.
“Gee!” he broke out, “the wedding-cakes!”
“Yes,” Little Ann proceeded, “they'd have to have wedding-cakes, and
perhaps if you went to the shops where they're sold and could make
friends with the people, they'd tell you whom they were selling them to,
and you could get the addresses and go and find out things.”
Tembarom, glowing with admiring enthusiasm, thrust out his hand.
“Little Ann, shake!” he said. “You've given me the whole show, just
like I thought you would. You're just the limit.”
“Well, a wedding-cake's the next thing after the bride,” she answered.
Her practical little head had given him the practical lead. The mere
wedding-cake opened up vistas. Confectioners supplied not only weddings,
but refreshments for receptions and dances. Dances suggested the “halls”
in which they were held. You could get information at such places. Then
there were the churches, and the florists who decorated festal scenes.
Tembarom's excitement grew as he talked. One plan led to another; vistas
opened on all sides. It all began to look so easy that he could not
understand how Biker could possibly have gone into such a land of
promise, and returned embittered and empty-handed.
“He thought too much of himself and too little of other people,” Little
Ann summed him up in her unsevere, reasonable voice. “That's so silly.”
Tembarom tried not to look at her affectionately, but his voice was
affectionate as well as admiring, despite him.
“The way you get on to a thing just in three words!” he said. “Daniel
Webster ain't in it.”
“I dare say if you let the people in the shops know that you come from a
newspaper, it'll be a help,” she went on with ingenuous worldly wisdom.
“They'll think it'll be a kind of advertisement. And so it will. You get
some neat cards printed with your name and Sunday Earth on them.”
“Gee!” Tembarom ejaculated, slapping his knee, “there's another! You
think of every darned thing, don't you?”
She stopped a moment to look at him.
“You'd have thought of it all yourself after a bit,” she said. She was
not of those unseemly women whose intention it is manifestly to instruct
the superior man. She had been born in a small Manchester street
and trained by her mother, whose own training had evolved through
affectionately discreet conjugal management of Mr. Hutchinson.
“Never you let a man feel set down when you want him to see a thing
reasonable, Ann,” she had said. “You never get on with them if you do.
They can't stand it. The Almighty seemed to make 'em that way. They've
always been masters, and it don't hurt any woman to let 'em be, if she
can help 'em to think reasonable. Just you make a man feel comfortable
in his mind and push him the reasonable way. But never you shove him,
Ann. If you do, he'll just get all upset-like. Me and your father have
been right-down happy together, but we never should have been if I
hadn't thought that out before we was married two weeks. Perhaps it's
the Almighty's will, though I never was as sure of the Almighty's way of
thinking as some are.”
Of course Tembarom felt soothed and encouraged, though he belonged
to the male development which is not automatically infuriated at a
suspicion of female readiness of logic.
“Well, I might have got on to it in time,” he answered, still trying
not to look affectionate, “but I've no time to spare. Gee! but I'm glad
you're here!”
“I sha'n't be here very long.” There was a shade of patient regret in
her voice. “Father's got tired of trying America. He's been disappointed
too often. He's going back to England.”
“Back to England!” Tembarom cried out forlornly, “Oh Lord! What shall we
all do without you, Ann?”
“You'll do as you did before we came,” said Little Ann.
“No, we sha'n't. We can't. I can't anyhow.” He actually got up from
his chair and began to walk about, with his hands thrust deep in his
pockets.
Little Ann began to put her first stitches into a red B. No human being
could have told what she thought.
“We mustn't waste time talking about that,” she said. “Let us talk about
the page. There are dressmakers, you know. If you could make friends
with a dressmaker or two they'd tell you what the wedding things were
really made of. Women do like their clothes to be described right.”