Wired Love by Ella Cheever Thayer (13 ebook reader txt) 📕

“Humph!” said Miss Kling, with a suspicious sniffle. “Strange that he should room with Quimby if his father is so wealthy? Why does he not have a room of his own?”

“He and Quimby are such friends, you see!” Mrs. Simonson explained.

Miss Kling gave another sniffle, this time of contempt, at such a reason being possible.

“Miss Rogers is in here about all her time when she isn’t at the office, is she not?” was the next question.

“She is very intimate with Miss Archer,” Mrs. Simonson replied.

“And I suppose he and that Quimby are in there with them every evening, are they not?” pursued Miss Kling.

They called quite often, Mrs. Simonson acknowledged, as did Mr. Norton, and Miss Fishblate.

“They seem to have good times, too,” added kindly Mrs. Simonson. “Young folks will be young folks, you know. And why not? Bless you! we never can enjoy ourselves again as we do when young. There are too many cares and worries when we get to our age.”

Miss Kling rose stiffly; this allusion to “our age” disgusted and offended her beyond pardon, and she flew into a spasm of sneezing.

“Well, I, for one, do not think such conduct is proper,” she said, as soon as possible. “I was brought up to understand that young ladies should never receive the visits of gentlemen except in the presence of older people!”

Mrs. Simonson only laughed a little forced laugh she had when she did not know exactly what to say. For her own part, although not willing to offend Miss Kling by saying so, she was glad to see her lodgers enjoying themselves; more than glad to have Clem there, as on his arrival she had promptly tacked an extra dollar on the room rent, under the plea that the wear and tear on furniture was greater with two in a room.

Miss Kling, fearing, perhaps, another reference to “our age,” left her, and next attacked Celeste Fishblate, having long ago discovered Nattie to be impregnable to the process known as “pumping,” a fact that had augmented her ever-increasing dislike towards her lodger.

From Celeste, she learned that they had “such nice times!” that Mr. Stanwood was “so splendid!” and that “Miss Archer was just dead in love with him, and he with her!”

“Humph!” thought Miss Kling with a sneeze. “It’s that Miss Archer then, is it?” Her next move was to arrest poor Quimby in the hall, intending to put him through a series of interrogations regarding the antecedents of his friend, and the length of his acquaintance with Miss Archer. But in this she was baffled, for at the first question, Quimby exclaimed,

“I⁠—I don’t know! Don’t ask me!” and fled.

Miss Kling, much to her dissatisfaction, was therefore compelled to make the little she had gathered go as far as it would, for the present. But she lived in hopes.

It was perhaps not wonderful, that Miss Kling sitting lonely by her fireside, and pining for her other self, should feel envious because her lodger, whom she took ostensibly for company, was enjoying herself over the way evening after evening, and telling her absolutely nothing about it, but confining their intercourse to the necessary civilities.

Undoubtedly the few weeks that had passed since Clem’s appearance on the scene ought to have been the happiest in Nattie’s hitherto lonely life, happier even than those in which she talked to the then unseen C, and speculated about him with Cyn. But yet⁠—she sometimes felt that a certain something that had been on the wire was lacking now; that Clem, while realizing all her old expectations of C, was not exactly what C had been to her. One reason of this she knew was her own inability to conquer a sort of timidity she felt in his presence, a timidity from which Cyn was certainly free. Well aware that beside the gay and brilliant Cyn she was nowhere, Nattie had a sensitive fear that he might be disappointed in her. But she did not yet know that the foundation of all these uneasy misgivings of hers was a selfish emotion, the same that had prompted that jealous pang at Cyn’s “we” the day he first discovered himself, and this was, that on the wire C had been all hers, but in Clem, Cyn seemed to have the largest share.

Twice he had called on Nattie at the office, but neither time could stop, and as it happened on each occasion, she was in the midst of a rush of business, hat left no chance for conversation. But one rainy Saturday afternoon, when a general dullness prevailed, and she was fervently wishing the hands of the clock might move on faster towards six, Clem holding a very wet umbrella, and with water dripping from his curly locks, presented himself. If he was not, he certainly ought to have been flattered by the blush with which Nattie involuntarily welcomed him.

“Did you rain down?” she hastily exclaimed, hoping by this trite commonplace to distract attention from the blush, of which she was conscious.

“It appears like it, doesn’t it?” he answered merrily, giving himself a little shake, and placing his wet umbrella and hat in a corner. “It was so dull at the store, I thought I would run around to the scene of former exploits. Do you not sometimes wish I was back at X n to keep you company such days as these?”

Without thinking twice before she spoke once, Nattie answered candidly, as she placed a chair for her visitor,

“Yes, I believe I do, often.”

“I do not know whether to take that as a compliment or otherwise,” Clem said, looking at her as if half vexed.

Nattie glanced up inquiringly.

“It certainly is a compliment to my abilities for, making myself agreeable at a distance. But⁠—” said Clem, with a shrug of his shoulders, “a poor fellow does not like to feel as if the farther away he is, the better he is liked!”

“Oh! I did not mean it that way at all!” exclaimed Nattie, in