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.
