"Well, take that paper down and give it to the apothecary, and wait till he makes up the medicine, and then bring it back to us."
"This paper, sor?"
"No; the medicine."
"And lave the paper wid um?"
"Yes. The apothecary will give you the medicine and keep the prescription. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sor."
"Well?"
"Is the 'pot'ecary after havin' the prescription now, sor?"
Olney took the paper out of his hand and shook it at him. " This paper--this--is the prescription. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sor."
"Take it to the apothecary."
"The man under the hotel, sor?"
"Yes, the one under the hotel. This prescription--this paper--give it to him; and he will make up a medicine, and give it to you in a bottle; and then you bring it here."
"The bottle, sor?"
"Yes, the bottle with the medicine in it."
"Ahl right, sor! I understand, sor!"
The man hurried away down the corridor, and Miss Aldgate shut the door and broke into a laugh at sight of Olney's face, red and heated with the effort he had been making.
Olney laughed too. "If the matter had been much simpler, I never should have got it into his head at all!"
"They seem to have no imagination!" said the girl. " Or too much," suggested Olney. " There is something very puzzling to us Teutons in the Celtic temperament. We don't know where to have an Irishman. We can predicate of a brother Teuton that this will please him, and that will vex him, but we can't of an Irishman. You treat him with the greatest rudeness and he doesn't mind it; then you propose to be particularly kind and nice, and he takes fire with the most bewildering offence."
"I know it," said Miss Aldgate. "That was the way with all our cooks in New York. Don't you remember, aunty?"
Mrs. Meredith made no answer.
"We can't call them stupid," Olney went on. "I think that as a general thing the Irish are quicker-witted than we are. They're sympathetic and poetic far beyond us. But they can't understand the simplest thing from us. Perhaps they set the high constructive faculties of the imagination at work, when they ought to use a little attention and mere common- sense. At any rate they seem more foreign to our intelligence, our way of thinking, than the Jews--or the negroes even."
"Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that about the negroes," said Miss Aldgate. "We were having a dispute this afternoon," she explained, "about the white waiters here and the colored waiters at the Hotel Vendome. I was calling on some friends we have there," and Miss Aldgate flushed a little as she said this: " or rather, they came here to see us, and then I drove back with them a moment; and it made me quite homesick to come away and leave those black waiters. Don't you think they're charming? With those soft voices and gentle manners? My aunt has no patience with me; she can't bear to have me look at them; but I never see one of them without loving them. I suppose it's because they're about the first thing I can remember. I was born in the South, you know. Perhaps I got to having a sort of fellow- feeling with them from my old black nurse. You know the Italians say you do."
She turned vividly toward Olney, as if to refer the scientific point to him, but he put it by with a laugh.
"I'm afraid I feel about them as Miss Aldgate does, Mrs. Meredith; and I hadn't an old nurse, either. I've been finding them wherever I've seen them, since I got back." Miss Aldgate clapped her hands. "To be sure, I haven't been here long enough to get tired of them."
"Oh, I should never tire of them! " said the girl. "But so far, certainly, they seem to me the most agreeable, the most interesting feature of the social spectacle."
"There, Aunt Caroline!"
"I must confess," Olney went on, "that it's given me a distinct pleasure whenever I've met one of them. They seem to be the only people left who have any heart for life here; they all look hopeful and happy, even in the rejection from their fellow- men, which strikes me as one of the most preposterous, the most monstrous things in the world, now I've got back to it here."
Mrs. Meredith lay with her hand shading her eyes and half her face. She asked, without taking her hand away, "Would you like to meet them on terms of social equality--intermarry with them?"
"Oh, now, Aunt Caroline! " Miss Aldgate broke in. Who's talking of anything like that?"
"I certainly am not," said Olney, as far as the intermarrying is concerned. But short of that I don't see why one shouldn't associate with them. There are terms a good deal short of the affection we lavish on dogs and horses that I fancy they might be very glad of. We might recognize them as fellow-beings in public, if we don't in private; but we ignore, if we don't repulse them at every point-from our business as well as our bosoms. Yes, it strikes one as very odd on getting home--very funny, very painful. You would think we might meet on common ground before our common God--but we don't. They have their own churches, and I suppose it would be as surprising to find one of them at a white communion-table as it would to find one at a white dinner-party."
Olney said this without the least feeling about the matter, except a sense of its grotesqueness. He was himself an agnostic, but he could be as censorious of the Christians who denied Christ in the sacrament, as if he had himself been a better sort. He added:
"Possibly the negroes would be welcome in a Catholic church; the Catholics seem to have kept the ideal of Christian equality in their churches. If ever they turn their attention to the negroes--"
"Oh, I can't imagine a colored Catholic," said Miss Aldgate. "There seems something unnatural in the very idea."
"All the same, there are a good many of them."
"In Boston?"
"No, not in Boston, I fancy." Mrs. Meredith had taken no farther part in the con- versation; she lay rigidly quiet on her sofa, with her hand shading her eyes.
There was a knock at the door, and Miss Aldgate sprang to open it, with the effect of being glad to work off her exuberant activity in that or any other way: with Mrs. Meredith so passive, and Olney so acquiescent, the discussion of the race problem was not half enough for her.
The man was there, with the bottle from the apothecary's, and he and Miss Aldgate had a beaming little interview. He exulted in getting back with the medicine all right, and she gratefully accepted his high sense of his offices, and repaid him his outlay, running about the room, and opening several trunks and bags to find her purse, and then added something for his trouble.
"Dear me! " she said, when she got rid of him, "I wish they wouldn't make it quite so clear that they expected to be I remembered." They've kept my memory on the qui vive every moment I've been in the hotel."
Olney smiled in sympathy as he took the bottle from her. "I've found it impossible to forget the least thing they've done for me, and I never boasted of my memory."
She stood watching
