Outside Inn Part 6

"If you only eat when it's convenient, or the mood takes you," Nancy cried out in real distress, "how can you ever be sure that you have calories enough? The requirement of an average man at active labor is estimated at over three thousand calories. You must have something like a balanced ration in order to do your work."

"Must I?" Collier Pratt smiled his rare smile. "Well, at any rate, it is good to hear you say so."

She finished her ice-cream, and Collier Pratt drank his mineral water slowly, and smoked innumerable cigarettes of Virginia tobacco. The conversation which had proceeded so expeditiously to this point seemed for no apparent reason, suddenly to become gratuitous. Nancy had never before begun on the subject of the balanced ration without being respectfully allowed to go through to the end. She had not been allowed to feel snubbed, but she was a little bewildered that any conversation in which she was partic.i.p.ating, could be so gracefully stopped before it was ended by her expressed desire.

Collier Pratt took his watch out of his pocket, and looked at it hastily.

"By jove," he said, "I had entirely forgotten. I have a child in my charge. I must be about looking after her."

"A child?" Nancy cried, astonished.

"Yes, a little girl. She's probably sitting up for me, poor baby. Can you get home alone, if I put you on a bus or a street-car?"

"If you'll call a taxi for me--" Nancy said.

She noticed that the check was paid with change instead of a bill. In fact, her host seemed not to have a bill of any denomination in his pocket, but to be undisturbed by the fact. He parted from her casually.

"Good-by, child," he said with his head in the door after he had given the chauffeur her street number; "with the permission of _le bon Dieu_, we shall see each other again. I feel that He is going to give it to us."

"Good-by," Nancy said to his retreating shoulder.

At her own front door was d.i.c.k's big Rolls-Royce, and d.i.c.k sitting inside of it, with his feet comfortably up, feigning sleep.

"You didn't think I'd go home until I saw you safe inside your own door, did you?" he demanded.

"Where's Betty?" Nancy asked mechanically.

"I sent Williams home with her. Then he came back here, and left the car with me."

"You needn't have waited," Nancy said, "I'm sorry, d.i.c.k, I--I had to have air. I had to get out. I couldn't stay inside a minute longer."

"You need never explain anything to me."

"Don't you want to know where I've been?"

d.i.c.k looked at her carefully before he made his answer. Then he said firmly.

"No, dear."

"I might have told you," she said, "if you had wanted to know." She felt her knees sagging with fatigue, and drooped against the door-frame.

"Come and sit in the car, and talk to me for a minute," he suggested.

"Do you good, before you climb the stairs."

He opened the car door for her ingratiatingly, but she shook her head.

"I've done unconventional things enough for one evening," she said.

"Unlock the door for me. Hitty'll be waiting up to take care of me."

"What's that queer thing you're wearing?" he asked her, as he held the door for her to pa.s.s through, "I never remember seeing you wear that before."

Nancy looked down wonderingly at the folds of the Inverness still swinging from her shoulders. She had been subconsciously aware of the grateful warmth in which she was encased ever since she snuggled comfortably into the depths of the taxi-cab into which Collier Pratt had tucked her.

"No, I never _have_ worn it before," she said, answering d.i.c.k's question.

CHAPTER V

SCIENCE

The activities of the day at Outside Inn began with luncheon and the preparation for it. Nancy longed to serve breakfast there, but as yet it had not seemed practicable to do so. Most of the patrons of the restaurant conducted the business of the day down-town, but had their actual living quarters in New York's remoter fastnesses,--Brooklyn, the Bronx or Harlem. Nancy was satisfied that the bulk of her patronage should be the commuting and cliff dwelling contingent of Manhattanites,--indeed it was the sort of patronage that from the beginning she had intended to cater to.

Nancy did most of the marketing herself at first, but Gaspard--the big cook--gradually coaxed this privilege away from her.

"You see," he said, "we sit--us together, and talk of eating"--he prided himself on his use of English, and never used his native tongue to help him out, except in moments of great excitement. "It is immediately after breakfast. Yes! I am full of milk-coffee sopped with bread, and you of bacon with eggs and marmalade. We say, what shall we give to our custom for its dinner and its luncheon? We think sadly--we who have but now brushed away the crumbs of breakfast--of those who must sit down so soon to the table groaning with viands. Therefore we say, 'Market delicately. Have the soup clear, the entree light and the salad green with plenty of vinegar.' Even your calories--they do not help us much. They are in quant.i.ties so unexpected in the food that weighs nothing in the scales. We say you shall go to market and buy these things, and you go. I stir and walk about, and grow restless for my _dejeuner_, and when you return from market, hungry too, we are not the same people who had thought our soup should be clear, and our entree more beautiful than nutritious. If I go to market myself _late_ I am inspired there to buy what is right, because by that hour I have a proper relish and understanding of what all the world should eat."

"I know he is right," Nancy said to Billy afterward in reporting the conversation, "I hate to admit it, but even my notion of what other people should eat is colored by my own relation to food. I never realized before how little use an intellect is in this matter of food values. I can actually get up a meal that according to the tables is scientifically correct that wouldn't feed anybody if they were hungry."

"One banana is equal to a pound and three-quarters of steak," Billy misquoted helpfully.

"The trouble is that it _isn't_," Nancy said, "except technically."

"You can't eat it and grow thin."

"You can't eat it and grow _fat_ unless it happens to be the peculiar food to which you are idiosyncratic."

"If that's really a word," Billy said, "I'll overlook your trying it out on me. If it isn't you'll have to take the consequences." He went through the pantomime of one preparing to do physical violence.

"Oh! it's a word. Ask Caroline." Nancy's eyes still held their look of being focussed on something in the remote distance. "The trouble with all this dietetic problem is that the individual is dependent on something more than an adjustment of values. His environment and his heredity play an active part in his diet problem. Some people can eat highly concentrated food, others have to have bulk, and so on. You can't subst.i.tute cheese and bananas for steak and do the race a service no matter what the cost of steak may soar to. You can't even subst.i.tute rice for potatoes."

"Not unless your patronage is more Oriental than Celtic."

"Healthy people have to have honest fare of about the type to which their environment has accustomed them, but intelligently supervised,--that's the conclusion I've come to."

"You may be right," Billy said, "my general notion has always been that everybody ate wrong, and that everybody who would stand for it ought to be started all over again. I wouldn't stand for it, so I've never looked into the matter."

"People don't eat wrong, that's the really startling discovery I've made recently. I mean healthy people don't."

"I don't believe it," said Billy; "the way people eat is one of the most outrageous of the human scandals. I read the newspapers."

"The newspapers don't know," Nancy said; "the individual usually has an instinctive working knowledge of the diet that is good for him, and his digestional experiences have taught him how to regulate it to some extent."

"How do you account for the clerk that orders coffee and sinkers at Child's every day?"

"That's exactly it," Nancy said. "He knows that he needs bulk and stimulation. He's handicapped by his poverty, but he gets the nearest subst.i.tute for the diet that suits him that he can get. If he could afford it he would have a square meal that would nourish him as well as warm and fill him."