finger ring."

"He can run a car, though," Nancy retorted.

"I'll bet little blue eyes could run a restaurant."

"That was just the trouble,--she would have been running mine in
twenty-four hours. Oh! I think what you men really like is a bossy
woman."

"Now, what a woman really likes in a man--" Betty began, "is--is--"

"Quality," Nancy finished for her succinctly.

"I wonder--" Dick mused. "I should have said finish."

"Almost any kind of finish so long as it is smooth enough," Billy
supplemented. "Look at the way they eat up this artistic and poetic
veneer."

"Look at the way they mangle their metaphors," Nancy complained to
Betty.

* * * * *

"I know what I really like in a woman," Dick whispered to Nancy, as he
helped her into her coat just before they started out together, "and
you know what I like, too. That's one of the subjects that needs no
discussion between us."

Betty and Billy walking up the avenue ahead of them,--Outside Inn was
located in one of the cross-streets in the thirties,--were discussing
their relation to one another.

"I wonder sometimes if Nancy's got it in her really to care for a
man," Betty argued; "she's as fond as she can be of Dick, but she'd
sacrifice him heart, soul and body for that restaurant of hers. She's
a perfect darling, I don't mean that; she's the very essence of
sweetness and kindness, but she doesn't seem to understand or
appreciate the possibilities of a devotion like Dick's. Do you think
she's really capable of loving anybody--of putting any man in the
world before all her ideas and notions and experiments?"

"Lord, yes," said Billy, accelerating his pace, suggestively in the
hope of getting Betty home in good time for him to dress to keep his
engagement with Caroline.

CHAPTER III

INAUGURATION

Nancy's heart was beating heavily when she woke on the memorable
morning of the day that was to inaugurate the activities of Outside
Inn. A confused dream of her Uncle Elijah in tatters on a park bench,
which was instantly metamorphosed into one of the rustic seats she had
arranged against the wall along the side of some of the bigger tables
in the marble worker's court, was ostensibly the cause of the
disturbance in her cardiac region. She had, it seemed, in the
interminable tangle of nightmare, given Molly and Dolly and the Alma
Tadema girl instructions to throw out the unwelcome guest, and she was
standin