_ XXIX
Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street--she heads letters from it playfully "The Hen Coop" for there is almost always some member of her own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls east for visits and clothes--Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished manners, the lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of her dear little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books--a countable number of them--and on top of it the genuine signed photograph of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she always makes you guess about, at a charity-bazaar.
Mrs. Winters herself--the Mrs. Winters who is
so interested in young people as long as they will do exactly what she wants them to--every inch of her from her waved white hair to the black jet spangles on her dinner gown or the notes of her "cultivated" voice as frosted and glittery and artificial as a piece of
glace fruit. And with her, Nancy, dressed for dinner too, because Mrs. Winters feels it to be one's duty to oneself to dress for dinner always, no matter how much one's guests may wish to relax--Nancy as much out of place in the apartment whose very cushions seem to smell of that modern old-maidishness that takes itself for superior feminist virtue as a crocus would be in an exhibition of wool flowers--a Nancy who doesn't talk much and has faint blue stains under her eyes.
"So everything went very satisfactorily indeed today, dear Nancy?"
Mrs. Winters' voice implies the uselessness of the question. Nancy is staying with Mrs. Winters--it would be very strange indeed if even the least important accompaniments of such a visit were not of the most satisfactory kind.
"Yes, Mrs. Winters. Nothing particularly happened, that is--but they like my work."
"Yes, dear," Mrs. Winters croons at her, she is being motherly. The effect produced is rather that of a sudden assumption of life and vicarious motherhood on the part of a small, brightly-painted porcelain hen.
"Then they will be sending you over shortly, no doubt? Across the wide wide sea--" adds Mrs. Winters archly, but Nancy is too tired-looking to respond to the fancy.
"I suppose they will when they get ready," she answers briefly and returns to her chicken-croquette with the thought that in its sleekness, genteelness, crumblingness, and generally unnourishing qualities it is really rather like Mrs. Winters. An immense desire, after two weeks of Mrs. Winters' mental and physical cuisine for something as hearty and gross as the mere sight of a double planked steak possesses her achingly--but Mrs. Winters was told once that she "ate like a bird."
"Well, in that case, dear Nancy, you certainly must not leave New York indefinitely without making the most of your opportunities," Mrs. Winters' tones are full of genteel decision. "I have made out a little list, dear Nancy, of some things which I thought, in my funny old way, might possibly be worth your while. We will talk it over after dinner, if you like--"
"Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Winters" says Nancy with dutiful hopelessness. She is only too well acquainted with Mrs. Winters' little lists. "As an
artist, as an
artist, dear Nancy, especially." Mrs. Winters breathes somewhat heavily, "Things That Should Interest you. Nothing Bizarre, you understand, Nothing Merely Freakish--but some of the Things in New York that I, Personally, have found Worth While."
The Things that Mrs. Winters Has Found Personally Worth While include a great many public monuments. She will give Nancy a similar list of Things Worth While in Paris, too, before Nancy sails--and Nancy smiles acceptably as each one of them is mentioned.
Only Mrs. Winters cannot see what Nancy is thinking--for if she did she might become startlingly human at once as even the most perfectly poised of spinsters is apt to do when she finds a rat in the middle of her neat white bed. For Nancy is thinking quite freely of various quaint and everlasting places of torment that might very well be devised for Mrs. Winters--and of the naked fact that once arrived in Paris it will matter very little to anybody what becomes of her and least of all to herself--and that Mrs. Winters doesn't know that she saw a chance mention of Mr. Oliver Crowe, the author of "Dancer's Holiday" today in the "Bookman" and that she cut it out because it had Oliver's name in it and that it is now in the smallest pocket of her bag with his creased and recreased first letter and the lucky piece she had from her nicest uncle and a little dim photograph of Mr. Ellicott and half a dozen other small precious things. _