In a Vance eating-place, ordering a dinner, and getting approximately what you order, is not a delicate epicurean art, but a matter of business, and not till an enormous platter of "Vance's Special Ham and Eggs, Country Style," was slammed down between them, and catsup, Worcestershire sauce, napkins, more rolls, water, and another fork severally demanded of the darting waitress, did Walter seem to remember that this was a romantic dinner with a strange girl, not a deal in food-supplies.
His wavering black eyes searched her face. She was agitatedly aware that her skin was broken out in a small red spot beside her lips; but she hoped that he would find her forehead clear, her mouth a flower. He suddenly nodded, as though he had grown used to her and found her comfortable. While his wreathing hands picked fantastically at a roll and made crosses with lumps of sugar, his questions probed at that hidden soul which she herself had never found. It was the first time that any one had demanded her formula of life, and in her struggle to express herself she rose into a frankness which Panama circles of courtship did not regard as proper to young women.
"What's your ambition?" he blurted. "Going to just plug along and not get anywhere?"
"No, I'm not; but it's hard. Women aren't trusted in business, and you can't count without responsibility. All I can do is keep looking."
"Go out for suffrage, feminism, so on?"
"I don't know anything about them. Most women don't know anything about them-about anything!"
"Huh! Most people don't! Wouldn't have office-grinding if people did know anything.... How much training have you had?"
"Oh, public school, high school, commercial college."
"Where?"
"Panama, Pennsylvania."
"I know. About like my own school in Kansas-the high-school principal would have been an undertaker if he'd had more capital.... Gee! principal and capital-might make a real cunning pun out of that if I worked over it a little. I know.... Go to church?"
"Why-why, yes, of course."
"Which god do you favor at present-Unitarian or Catholic or Christian Science or Seventh-Day Advent?"
"Why, it's the same-"
"Now don't spring that 'it's the same God' stuff on me. It isn't the same God that simply hones for candles and music in an Episcopal Church and gives the Plymouth Brotherhood a private copyright revelation that organs and candles are wicked."
"You're terribly sacrilegious."
"You don't believe any such thing. Or else you'd lam me-same as they used to do in the crusades. You don't really care a hang."
"No, I really don't care!" she was amazed to hear herself admit.
"Of course, I'm terribly crude and vulgar, but then what else can you be in dealing with a bunch of churches that haven't half the size or beauty of farmers' red barns? And yet the dubs go on asserting that they believe the church is God's house. If I were God, I'd sure object to being worse housed than the cattle. But, gosh! let's pass that up. If I started in on what I think of almost anything-churches or schools, or this lying advertising game-I'd yelp all night, and you could always answer me that I'm merely a neurotic failure, while the big guns that I jump on own motor-cars." He stopped his rapid tirade, chucked a lump of sugar at an interrogative cat which was making the round of the tables, scowled, and suddenly fired at her:
"What do you think of me?"
"You're the kindest person I ever met."
"Huh? Kind? Good to my mother?"
"Perhaps. You've made the office happy for me. I really admire you.... I s'pose I'm terribly unladylike to tell you."
"Gee whiz!" he marveled. "Got an admirer! And I always thought you were an uncommonly level-headed girl. Shows how you can fool 'em."
He smiled at her, directly, rather forlornly, proud of her praise.
Regardless of other tables, he thrust his arm across, and with the side of his hand touched the side of hers for a second. Dejectedly he said: "But why do you like me? I've good intentions; I'm willing to pinch Tolstoi's laurels right off his grave, and orate like William Jennings Bryan. And there's a million yearners like me. There ain't a hall-bedroom boy in New York that wouldn't like to be a genius."
"I like you because you have fire. Mr. Babson, do you-"
"Walter!"
"How premature you are!"
"Walter!"
"You'll be calling me 'Una' next, and think how shocked the girls will be."
"Oh no. I've quite decided to call you 'Goldie.' Sounds nice and sentimental. But for heaven's sake go on telling me why you like me. That isn't a hackneyed subject."
"Oh, I've never known anybody with fire, except maybe S. Herbert Ross, and he-he-"
"He blobs around."
"Yes, something like that. I don't know whether you are ever going to do anything with your fire, but you do have it, Mr. Babson!"
"I'll probably get fired with it.... Say, do you read Omar?"
In nothing do the inarticulate "million hall-room boys who want to be geniuses," the ordinary, unshaved, not over-bathed, ungrammatical young men of any American city, so nearly transcend provincialism as in an enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic, Elbert Hubbard or John Kendrick Bangs, or, in Walter Babson's case, Mr. Fitzgerald's variations on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous courts, but read him she had; and such was Walter's delight in that fact that he immediately endowed her with his own ability to enjoy cynicism. He jabbed at the menu with a fork and glowed and shouted, "Say, isn't it great, that quatrain about 'Take the cash and let the credit go'?"
While Una beamed and enjoyed her boy's youthful enthusiasm. Mother of the race, ancient tribal woman, medieval chatelaine, she was just now; kin to all the women who, in any age, have clapped their hands to their men's boasting.
She agreed with him that "All these guys that pride themselves on being gentlemen-like in English novels-are jus' the same as the dubs you see in ordinary life."
And that it was not too severe an indictment to refer to the advertising-manager as "S. Herbert Louse."
And that "the woman feeding by herself over at that corner table looks mysterious, somehow. Gee! there must be a tragedy in her life."
But her gratification in being admitted to his enthusiasms was only a background for her flare when he boldly caught up her white paw and muttered, "Tired little hand that has to work so hard!"
She couldn't move; she was afraid to look at him. Clattering restaurant and smell of roast pork and people about her all dissolved in her agitation. She shook her head violently to awaken herself, heard herself say, calmly, "It's terribly late. Don't you think it is?" and knew that she was arising. But she moved beside him down the street in languor, wondering in every cell of her etherealized body whether he would touch her hand again; what he would do. Not till they neared the Subway station did she, woman, the protector, noting his slow step and dragging voice, rouse herself to say, "Oh, don't come up in the Subway; I'm used to it, really!"
"My dear Goldie, you aren't used to anything in real life. Gee! I said that snappily, and it don't mean a thing!" he gleefully pointed out. He seized her arm, which prickled to the touch of his fingers, rushed her down the Subway steps, and while he bought their tickets they smiled at each other.
Several times on the way up he told her that it was a pleasure to have some one who could "appreciate his honest-t'-God opinions of the managing editor and S. Herbert Frost."
The Subway, plunging through unvaried darkness, levitated them from the district of dark loft-buildings and theater-bound taxicabs to a far-out Broadway, softened with trees and brightened with small apartment-houses and little shops. They could see a great feathery space of vernal darkness down over the Hudson at the end of a street. Steel-bound nature seemed reaching for them wherever in a vacant lot she could get free and send out quickening odors of fresh garden soil.