They had a parting that Lemuel’s mother would
have called sickish without question; but it all seemed
heavenly sweet and right. Statira said now he
had got to kiss ’Manda Grier too; and when he
insisted, her chin knocked against his, and saved her
lips, and she gave him a good box on the ear.
“There, I guess that ’ll do for one while,”
she said, arranging her tumbled hair; “but there’s
more kisses where that came from, for both of you
if you want ’em. Coots!”
Once, when Lemuel was little, he had a fever, and
he was always seeming to glide down the school-house
stairs without touching the steps with his feet.
He remembered this dream now, when he reached the
street; he felt as if he had floated down on the air;
and presently he was back in his little den at the
hotel, he did not know how. He ran the elevator
up and down for the ladies who called him from the
different floors, and he took note of the Sunday difference
in their toilet as they passed in to tea; but in the
same dreamy way.
After the boarders had supped, he went in as usual
with Mrs. Harmon’s nephew, less cindery than
on week-days, from the cellar, and Mrs. Harmon, silken
smooth for her evening worship at the shrine of a
popular preacher from New York. The Sunday evening
before, she had heard an agnostic lecture in the Boston
Theatre, and she said she wished to compare notes.
Her tranquillity was unruffled by the fact that the
head-waitress had left, just before tea; she presumed
they could get along just as well without her as with
her: the boarders had spoiled her, anyway.
She looked round at Lemuel’s face, which beamed
with his happiness, and said she guessed she should
have to get him to open the dining-room doors, and
seat the transients the next few days, till she could
get another head-waitress. It did not seem to
be so much a request as a resolution; but Lemuel willingly
assented. Mrs. Harmon’s nephew said that
so long as they did not want him to do it he did not
care who did it; and if a few of them had his furnace
to look after they would not be so anxious to kick.
Lemuel had to be up early in the morning to get the
bills of fare, which Mrs. Harmon called the Meanyous,
written in time for the seven o’clock breakfasters;
and after opening the dining-room doors with fit ceremony,
he had to run backward and forward to answer the rings
at the elevator, and to pull out the chairs for the
ladies at the table, and slip them back under them
as they sat down. The ladies at the St. Albans
expected to get their money’s worth; but their
exactions in most things were of use to Lemuel.
He grew constantly nimbler of hand and foot under
them, and he grew quicker-witted; he ceased to hulk
in mind and body. He did not employ this new mental
agility in devising excuses and delays; he left that
to Mrs. Harmon, whose conscience was easy in it; but
from seven o’clock in the morning till eleven
at night, when the ladies came in from the theatre,
he was so promptly, so comfortingly at their service,
that they all said they did not see how they had ever
got along without him.
