the ideal setting for her adventure in practical philanthropy, while
the ubiquitous tea-room and antique-shop combination gave her the
inspiration to stage her own undertaking even more spectacularly. Her
enterprise was destined to flourish picturesquely in the open court
during the fair months of the year, and in the winter months, or in
the event of a bad storm, to be housed under the eaves in the rambling
garret of the old brick building, the lower floor of which was given
over to traffic in marbles.

She sighed happily. Billy, extricating himself from the grasp of an
outstretched marble hand, which bad seemed to clutch desperately at
his elbow, and narrowly escaping a plunge into a too convenient bird's
bath, turned to see her eyes following him, and waved gaily, but she
scarcely realized that he had done so. It was rather with the eye of
her mind that she was contemplating the dark, quadrangular area
outstretched before her. In spirit she was moving to and fro among the
statuary, bringing a housewifely order out of the chaos that
prevailed,--placing stone ladies draped in stone or otherwise;
cherubic babies, destined to perpetual cold water bathing; strange
mortuary furniture, in the juxtaposition that would make the most
effective background for her enterprise.

She saw the gritty, gray paving stones of the court cleared of their
litter, and scoured free from discoloration and grime, set with dozens
of little tables immaculate in snowy napery and shiny silver, and
arranged with careful irregularity at the most alluring angle. She saw
a staff of Hebe-like waitresses in blue chambray and pink ribbons, to
match the chinaware, and all bearing a marked resemblance to herself
in her last flattering photograph, moving among a crowd of well
brought up but palpably impoverished young people,--mostly social
workers and artists. They were _all_ young, and most of them very
beautiful. In all her twenty-five years, she had never before been so
close to a vision realized, as she was at that moment.

"Outside Inn," she said to herself, still smiling. "It's a perfect
name for it, really. Outside Inn!"

CHAPTER II

APPLICANTS FOR BLUE CHAMBRAY

Ann Martin was an orphan of New England extraction. Her father, the
eldest child of a simple unpretentious country family in Western
Massachusetts, had been a brilliant but erratic throw-back to
Mayflower traditions and Puritan intellectualism. He had married a
girl with m