Bought it for my oldest girl. You know, I’d kind of like to give it to you.”
“No, no, Bakeless!”
Men did not usually refer to their daughters.…
“I’d kind of like for you to have it, Ray.”
He produced from a waistcoat-pocket a box containing a small silver human foot, meant to dangle from a fob or neck-chain.
“Why, Bakeless, you take that right along back to New York to your—to her.”
“I’ll get her something in Dayton. Take it.”
“You’re a dear!”
“What do I get?” he said, and puckered his lips.
She kissed him, as they bobbed along in the gathering darkness.
“That’s right. Pay Papa.”
“That wasn’t pay.”
“You’re right. That’s what I like about you. Never feel you’re bleeding a man. Give me another.”
“Not here, Bakeless, right in front of the Burnet House.”
“Think over my little proposition, Miss Ray. I’ll be back in three months. New York is a big town and I’ll tuck you away in it as snug as you please. I’m telling you, Ray, I’m not small.”
Now was the time to slap him resoundingly across that blue jowl.
“Put your arms around me, honey, for I’ve got a lot of money, love me little, love me long.”
“Let me out here too, Bakeless! You don’t need to send me home in this cab. I’ll take the Colerain Avenue car.”
It was there, at the curb of the C. H. and D. depot, that she met for the first time Walter Saxel, who, with satchel in hand, was making for the hansom cab which she and Bakeless were vacating.
“Hello, there, Bakeless. Don’t mind if I take your cab, do you?”
“Honored, as they say in the classics. Saxel, want you to meet a tony little friend of mine. Ray Schmidt. Ever met, you two? Might ride her up a ways, Saxel,” called Bakeless over one shoulder, as he dashed for his train.
“Your way is my way,” said Saxel, and stood aside for her to mount back into the cab.
It was to occur to her countless times in later years that the first words he ever said to her, five of them, reversed, so as to apply to her, were to become the slogan for the rest of her life.
“Your way is my way, Walter,” was born into her subconsciousness that hot May evening toward the close of a century, as she stood at the curb in front of the C. H. and D. station, looking for the first time into the face of a young man whose heavy black eyebrows were the shape of Mercury-wings.
8
“Why do you want to go home?” he said, after an introductory argument as to destination. “You can always go there.”
She laughed the first laugh of what was to be her perpetual delight in his smallest saying. Kurt lay on her mind, but remotely now.
“I’ll have to telephone. The store at our corner has a Kincloch. One of the boys there will take a message across to the house for me to somebody waiting on the porch and tell him I can’t be home.”
“That is precisely what corner stores are for.”
“Do you always get what you want this easily?” She usually said that, when responding to the importunings for the many favors she had to yield.
“I have never wanted anything this badly, so I don’t know.”
There was a sticky, pleasant quality about his voice, as if it wanted to cling.
“Tell you how we are going to do it. I’m going to break my supper engagement too, only I’ll have to write a note and send it out by messenger. We’ll drop off here at the Burnet House, and get ourselves fed. Hungry?”
Time and time again in later years she was to recall to him this evening, when she followed up, within the hour, a meal at Mecklenburg’s which had more than satiated her, with double sirloin steak, accordion potatoes, and tutti-frutti ice cream at the Burnet House.
“Funny that I’ve never seen you around town,” she said to him across a table in a dining room of heavy drape and crystal chandelier. A candle burned under a pink shade, and women in dolmans, with bare shoulders rising broadly from their eighteen-inch waists, and aigrets