第95章

"Dull! Holy cats! no," he grinned."There wasn't any time for being anything.You just had to keep going."She became in time familiar with Mrs.Bowse's boarding-house and boarders.She knew Mrs.Peck and Mr.Jakes and the young lady from the notion counter (those wonderful shops!).Julius and Jem and the hall bedroom and the tilted chairs and cloud of smoke she saw so often that she felt at home with them.

"Poor Mrs.Bowse," she said, "must have been a most respectable, motherly, hard-working creature.Really a nice person of her class."She could not quite visualize the "parlor," but it must have been warm and comfortable.And the pianola--a piano which you could play without even knowing your notes--What a clever invention! America seemed full of the most wonderfully clever things.

Tembarom was actually uplifted in soul when he discovered that she laid transparent little plans for leading him into talk about New York.She wanted him to talk about it, and the Lord knows he wanted to talk about himself.He had been afraid at first.She might have hated it, as Palford did, and it would have hurt him somehow if she hadn't understood.But she did.Without quite realizing the fact, she was beginning to love it, to wish she had seen it.Her Somerset vicarage imagination did not allow of such leaps as would be implied by the daring wish that sometime she might see it.

But Tembarom's imagination was more athletic.

"Jinks! wouldn't it be fine to take her there! The lark in London wouldn't be ace high to it."The Hutchinsons were not New Yorkers, but they had been part of the atmosphere of Mrs.Bowse's.Mr.Hutchinson would of course be rather a forward and pushing man to be obliged to meet, but Little Ann! She did so like Little Ann! And the dear boy did so want, in his heart of hearts, to talk about her at times.She did not know whether, in the circumstances, she ought to encourage him; but he was so dear, and looked so much dearer when he even said "Little Ann," that she could not help occasionally leading him gently toward the subject.

When he opened the newspapers and found the advertisements of the flats, she saw the engaging, half-awkward humorousness come into his eyes.

"Here's one that would do all right," he said--"four rooms and a bath, eleventh floor, thirty-five dollars a month."He spread the newspaper on the table and rested on his elbow, gazing at it for a few minutes wholly absorbed.Then he looked up at her and smiled.

"There's a plan of the rooms," he said."Would you like to look at it?

Shall I bring your chair up to the table while we go over it together?"He brought the chair, and side by side they went over it thoroughly.

To Miss Alicia it had all the interest of a new kind of puzzle.He explained it in every detail.One of his secrets had been that on several days when Galton's manner had made him hopeful he had visited certain flat buildings and gone into their intricacies.He could therefore describe with color their resources--the janitor; the elevator; the dumb-waiters to carry up domestic supplies and carry down ashes and refuse; the refrigerator; the unlimited supply of hot and cold water, the heating plan; the astonishing little kitchen, with stationary wash-tubs; the telephone, if you could afford it,-- all the conveniences which to Miss Alicia, accustomed to the habits of Rowcroft Vicarage, where you lugged cans of water up-stairs and down if you took a bath or even washed your face; seemed luxuries appertaining only to the rich and great.

"How convenient! How wonderful! Dear me! Dear me!" she said again and again, quite flushed with excitement."It is like a fairy-story.And it's not big at all, is it?""You could get most of it into this," he answered, exulting."You could get all of it into that big white-and gold parlor.""The white saloon?"

He showed his teeth.

"I guess I ought to remember to call it that," he said, "but it always makes me think of Kid MacMurphy's on Fourth Avenue.He kept what was called a saloon, and he'd had it painted white.""Did you know him?" Miss Alicia asked.

"Know him! Gee! no! I didn't fly as high as that.He'd have thought me pretty fresh if I'd acted like I knew him.He thought he was one of the Four Hundred.He'd been a prize-fighter.He was the fellow that knocked out Kid Wilkens in four rounds." He broke off and laughed at himself."Hear me talk to you about a tough like that!" he ended, and he gave her hand the little apologetic, protective pat which always made her heart beat because it was so "nice."He drew her back to the advertisements, and drew such interesting pictures of what the lives of two people--mother and son or father and daughter or a young married couple who didn't want to put on style--might be in the tiny compartments, that their excitement mounted again.

This could be a bedroom, that could be a bedroom, that could be the living-room, and if you put a bit of bright carpet on the hallway and hung up a picture or so, it would look first-rate.He even went into the matter of measurements, which made it more like putting a puzzle together than ever, and their relief when they found they could fit a piece of furniture he called "a lounge" into a certain corner was a thing of flushing delight.The "lounge," she found, was a sort of cot with springs.You could buy them for three dollars, and when you put on a mattress and covered it with a "spread," you could sit on it in the daytime and sleep on it at night, if you had to.

From measurements he went into calculations about the cost of things.

He had seen unpainted wooden tables you could put mahogany stain on, and they'd look all you'd want.He'd seen a splendid little rocking-chair in Second Avenue for five dollars, one of the padded kind that ladies like.He had seen an arm-chair for a man that was only seven;but there mightn't be room for both, and you'd have to have the rocking-chair.He had once asked the price of a lot of plates and cups and saucers with roses on them, and you could get them for six; and you didn't need a stove because there was the range.