Louis Joseph Vance

Nobody Louis Joseph Vance

ANARCHY "What you gonna have?" To this inquiry the patron made no response; head bent, nose between the pages of the magazine, she pored sedulously over a legend attached to one of the illustrations. After a decent pause in waiting the waitress renewed her demand with a sharper accent: "Say, lis'en; what you want?" "White satin, veiled with point d' Angleterre,'" Miss Manvers replied distinctly, if without looking up, aware simply of something imperative in the starched but humid presence at her elbow. Pardonably startled, the waitress demanded with the rising inflection: "Wha-a-at?" "'The court train,'" Miss Manvers pursued in abstraction, "'is lined with lace and dotted with bouquets of orange-blossoms--'" She checked herself suddenly, looked up shyly, and essayed a pale, apologetic smile. "I'm sorry; I didn't realise--" But now the waitress had caught a glimpse of the illustration and was bending over the patron's shoulder for a better look. "Gee!" she commented sincerely. "Ain't that a dream?" "Yes," Miss Manvers admitted wistfully, "it's a dream, right enough!" "That's so, too." Deftly, with a large, moist, red hand, the waitress arranged knife, fork, spoon, and paper serviette on the unclothed brown board before Miss Manvers. "That's the worst of them fashion mag'zines," she complained; "they get your goat. Sometimes after readin' some of that dope I can't hardly remember orders right, just for wishin' somebody'd come along and hang some of them joyful rags onto me!" Then, catching the eye of the manager, she straightway resumed her professional habit of slightly wilted hauteur--compounded in equal parts of discontent, tired feet, heat-fag and that profound disdain for food-consuming animals which inevitably informs the mind of every quick-lunch waitress. "What you gonna have?" she demanded dispassionately.