der. "I feel as if I were going to
be married, or--or something. I'm so excited."

"I guess you'd be a good sight more excited if you was going to be
married"--Hitty was a widow of twenty-five years' standing--"and
according to my way of thinking 'twould be a good deal more suitable,"
she added darkly. "I don't take much stock in this hotel business. In
my day there warn't no such newfangled foolishness for a girl to take
up with instead o' getting married and settled down. When I was your
age I was working on my second set o' baby clothes."

"Don't scold, Hitty," Nancy coaxed. "I could make perfectly good baby
clothes if I needed to. Don't you think I'll be of more use in the
world serving nourishing food to hordes of hungry men and women than
making baby clothes for one hypothetical baby?"

"I dunno about the hypothetical part," Hitty said, folding back the
counterpane, inexorably. "What I do know is that a girl that's getting
to be an old girl--like you--past twenty-five--ought to be bestirring
herself to look for a life pardner if she don't see any hanging around
that suits her, instead of opening up a hotel for a passel of perfect
strangers. If ever I saw a woman spoiling for something of her own to
fuss over--"

"If ever there was a woman who _had_ something of her own to fuss
over," Nancy cried ecstatically, "I'm that woman to-day, Hitty. You're
a professional Puritan, and you don't understand the broader aspects
of the maternal instinct." She sprang out of bed, and tucked her bare
pink toes into the fur bordered blue mules that peeped from under the
bed, and slipped into the wadded blue silk bathrobe that lay on the
chair beside her. "Is my bath drawn, Hitty?"

"Your bath is drawed," Hitty acknowledged sourly, "and your breakfast
will be on the table in half an hour by the clock."

"I suppose I must require that corrective New England influence,"
Nancy said to herself, as she tried the temperature of her bath and
found it frigid, "just as some people need acid in their diet. If my
mother were alive, I wonder what she would have said to me this
morning."

Nancy spent a long day directing, planning, and arranging for the
great event of the evening, the first dinner served to the public at
Outside Inn.

From the basement kitchen to the ground-floor serving-room in the
rear, space cunningly coaxed from the reluctant marble worker, the
mechanism of Nancy's equipment was as perfect as lavish expenditure
and