Property:Has text
From Off the Road Database
This is a property of type Text.
F
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<p>The dust behind his car concealed him. For twenty miles she was silent, save when she burst out to her father, "I do hope you're enjoying the trip. It's so easy to make people unhappy. I wonder—— No. Had to be done."
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<p>"No, everything is fine. I'm sure it will be, now. I'm afraid we are holding you back. You mustn't worry about us."
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<p>"Uh, Mr., uh—Daggett, was it?—I wonder if you won't stay a little closer to us hereafter? I was getting rather a good change out of the trip, but I'm afraid that now—— If it wouldn't be an insult, I'd beg you to consider staying with us for a consideration, uh, you know, remuneration, and you could——"
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<p>She was escorted by a bouncing, black-eyed waitress to a table for four. The next table was a long one, at which seven traveling men, or local business men whose wives were at the lake for the summer, ceased trying to get nourishment out of the food, and gawped at her. Before the Boltwoods were seated, the waitress dabbed at non-existent spots on their napkins, ignored a genuine crumb on the cloth in front of Claire's plate, made motions at a cup and a formerly plated fork, and bubbled, "Autoing through?"
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<p>"Seems to be. She's kind of demanding. She wanted a little car of her own, but I didn't think she could keep up with me, not on a long hike."
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<p>Mr. Boltwood interposed, "Are the ham and eggs ready?"
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<p>"No, I'm sure nothing will go wrong now. You mustn't feel responsible for us. But, uh, you understand we're very grateful for what you have done and, uh, perhaps we shall see each other in Seattle?" She made it brightly interrogatory.
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<p>She switched off the power—and suddenly she was in a whirlwind of dizzy sickening tiredness. Even in her abandonment to exhaustion she noticed that the young man did not stare at her but, keeping his back to her, removed the tow-rope, and stowed it away in his bug. She wondered whether it was tact or yokelish indifference.
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<p>From the second step the night clerk looked down at her as though she were a specimen that ought to be pinned on the corks at once, and he said loudly, "No, ma'am. Neither of 'em. Got no rooms vacant with bawth, or bath either! Not but what we got 'em in the house. This is an up-to-date place. But one of 'm's took, and the other has kind of been out of order, the last three-four months."
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<p>He would stroll in, look about vacuously, and pipe to the suspicious night attendant, "Seen a traveling man named Smith?" Usually the garage man snarled, "No, I ain't seen nobody named Smith. An'thing else I can do for you?" But once he was so unlucky as to find the long-missing Mr. Smith!
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<p>"If she does," the tough shouted, "I'll run 'em off the bank."
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<p>"I'm immensely grateful to you, but—do you know much about motors? How can I get out of this mud?"
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<p>Never a tawny-beached ocean has the sweetness of the prairie slew. Rippling and blue, with long grass up to its edge, a spot of dancing light set in the miles of rustling wheat, it retains even in July, on an afternoon of glare and brazen locusts, the freshness of a spring morning. A thousand slews, a hundred lakes bordered with rippling barley or tinkling bells of the flax, Claire passed. She had left the occasional groves of oak and poplar and silver birch, and come out on the treeless Great Plains.
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<p>"Stuck?" he inquired, not very intelligently. "How much is Adolph charging you?"
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<p>"Why!" Claire gasped, "why, they aren't rude. They care—about people they never saw before. That's why they ask questions! I never thought—I never thought! There's people in the world who want to know us without having looked us up in the Social Register! I'm so ashamed! Not that the sunshine changes my impression of this coffee. It's frightful! But that will improve. And the people—they were being friendly, all the time. Oh, Henry B., young Henry Boltwood, you and your godmother Claire have a lot to learn about the world!"
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<p>He stopped on his way to the garage to pet Emil Baumschweiger's large gray cat, publicly known as Rags, but to Milt and to the lady herself recognized as the unfortunate Countess Vere de Vere—perhaps the only person of noble ancestry and mysterious past in Milt's acquaintance. The Baumschweigers did not treat their animals well; Emil kicked the bay mare, and threw pitchforks at Vere de Vere. Milt saluted her and sympathized:
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