At the moment of this discovery the host came fighting his way up to make sure that Jeff had been provided for in the way of introductions. He promptly introduced him to Miss Lynde. She said: "Oh, that's been done!
Can't you think of something new?" Jeff liked the style of this.
"I don't mind it, but I'm afraid Mr. Durgin must find it monotonous.""Oh, well, do something original yourself, then, Miss Lynde!" said the host. "Start a movement for that room across the passage; that's mine, too, for the occasion; and save some of these people's lives. It's suffocating in here.""I don't mind saving Mr. Durgin's," said the girl, "if he wants it saved.""Oh, I know he's just dying to have you save it," said the host, and he left them, to inspire other people to follow their example. But such as glanced across the passage into the overflow room seemed to think it now the possession solely of the pioneers of the movement. At any rate, they made no show of joining them; and after Miss Lynde and Jeff had looked at the pictures on the walls and the photographs on the mantel of the room where they found themselves, they sat down on chairs fronting the open door and the door of the room they had left. The window-seat would have been more to Jeff's mind, and he had proposed it, but the girl seemed not to have heard him; she took the deep easy-chair in full view of the company opposite, and left him to pull up a chair beside her.
"I always like to see the pictures in a man's room," she said, with a little sigh of relief from their inspection and a partial yielding of her figure to the luxury of the chair. "Then I know what the man is. This man--I don't know whose room it is--seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the theatre.""Isn't that where most of them spend their time?" asked Jeff.
"I'm sure I don't know. Is that where you spend yours?""It used to be. I'm not spending my time anywhere just now." She looked questioningly, and he added, " I haven't got any to spend.""Oh, indeed! Is that a reason? Why don't you spend somebody else's?""Nobody has any, that I know."
"You're all working off conditions, you mean?""That's what I'm doing, or trying to."
"Then it's never certain whether you can do it, after all?""Not so certain as to be free from excitement," said Jeff, smiling.
"And are you consumed with the melancholy that seems to be balling up all the men at the prospect of having to leave Harvard and go out into the hard, cold world?""I don't look it, do I? Jeff asked:
"No, you don't. And you don't feel it? You're not trying concealment, and so forth?""No; if I'd had my own way, I'd have left Harvard before this." He could see that his bold assumption of difference, or indifference, told upon her. "I couldn't get out into the hard, cold world too soon.""How fearless! Most of them don't know what they're going to do in it.""I do."
"And what are you going to do? Or perhaps you think that's asking!""Oh no. I'm going to keep a hotel."
He had hoped to startle her, but she asked, rather quietly, "What do you mean?" and she added, as if to punish him for trying to mystify her:
"I've heard that it requires gifts for that. Isn't there some proverb?""Yes. But I'm going to try to do it on experience." He laughed, and he did not mind her trying to hit him, for he saw that be had made her curious.
"Do you mean that you have kept a hotel?"
"For three generations," he returned, with a gravity that mocked her from his bold eyes.
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," she said, indifferently. "Where is your hotel? In Boston--New York--Chicago?""It's in the country--it's a summer hotel," he said, as before.
She looked away from him toward the other room. "There's my brother.
I didn't know he was coming."
"Shall I go and tell him where you are?" Jeff asked, following the direction of her eyes.
"No, no; he can find me," said the girl, sinking back in her chair again.
He left her to resume the talk where she chose, and she said: "If it's something ancestral, of course--""I don't know as it's that, exactly. My grandfather used to keep a country tavern, and so it's in the blood, but the hotel I mean is something that we've worked up into from a farm boarding-house.""You don't talk like a country person," the girl broke in, abruptly.
"Not in Cambridge. I do in the country."
"And so," she prompted, "you're going to turn it into a hotel when you've got out of Harvard.""It's a hotel already, and a pretty big one; but I'm going to make the right kind of hotel of it when I take hold of it.""And what is the right kind of a hotel?"
