“I am an operator, you see.”
“Oh!” said Nattie, comprehensively, but not at all delightedly, for operator or no operator, and notwithstanding the sort of freemasonry between those of the craft, she preferred his room to his company. But constraining herself, she added as civilly as possible, “Did you wish to send a message, or speak to anyone on the wire?”
“No, thank you,” he answered; then, with an insinuating smile,
“Can’t you guess who I am?”
“I really can’t,” Nattie replied, coldly and indifferently; thinking, “some of the operators down town, I suppose, and a delightful set they are if he is a specimen! So impertinent of him!”
“Can’t you?” laughing and displaying his obtrusive teeth to their utmost advantage. “Now just think of someone you have been buzzing lately, and then guess, won’t you, N?”
Without the least suspicion Nattie shook her head impatiently, feeling very much disgusted, and longing for some interruption to occur. But his next words were startling. Leaning forward very confidentially, he asked with a smile of consciousness,
“Do you see that twinkle, N?”
“What!” ejaculated Nattie—so forcibly that a passing countryman stopped with a peanut half cracked, to stare—and clutching at an umbrella hanging by her side, for support, she turned a horror-stricken face to the questioner, who, looking as if he expected her to be enraptured, added,
“You know a fellow that signs C, don’t you?”
The bump of self-conceit must have largely overbalanced the perceptive faculties of this obnoxious young man, if he could possibly mistake the expression on Nattie’s face for rapture, as, frantically grasping the umbrella, she gasped,
“No—no—it can’t be—you are not—not—”
“Not C? Ain’t I, though!” laughed the proprietor of the ring, pin, bear’s-grease, et cetera.
“But,” said poor Nattie, clinging desperately to hope and the umbrella, “C said this morning he was going to B a—and—”
“That was a trick to take you by surprise,” he interrupted, with great enjoyment of his own words. “I knew I was coming here, all the time, but I wanted to give you a nice little surprise. Think I have, eh?” and he laughed again, and winked with almost vulgar assurance.
Nattie let go of hope and the umbrella, and collapsed with her romance into a chair; and she thought of Quimby’s warning about the “soiled invisible,” and barely suppressed a groan. Involuntarily she stole a glance at this too-visible person, and shuddered. Could she reconcile C, her visionary, interesting, witty and gentlemanly C of the wire, with this musk-scented being of greasy red hair, cheap jewelry and vulgar manners? Impossible!
“It is the nightmare! it cannot be!” she thought, with the despairing refuge in dreams we often take when suddenly overwhelmed with terrible realities.
As she made no reply to his last observation, her visitor, glancing at her as if slightly puzzled by her behavior, went on—
“I did not think you would be so bashful, after all our talks. I am not,”—a fact hardly necessary to mention. “We ought to be pretty good friends by this time. Say, do I look as you expected I would? and as if to give her a better view, he pushed his hat back on his head, a kindness wholly unappreciated, as Nattie had seen more than sufficient of him already.”
“Not—not exactly!” she stammered, in a sort of dazed way.
“I believe you thought I was one of those slim fellows whose bones rattle when they walk, didn’t you? I am no such a fellow, you see. But you ain’t a bit as I imagined. May I be a plug3 forever if you are!”
Nattie was too wretched, too unable even yet to realize that her C and this odious creature were one and the same, to ask, as he evidently expected natural curiosity would induce her to do, in what way she so differed from the person of his imagination.
“You go beyond all my calculations,” he continued, flatteringly, after waiting in vain for a question from her; “Only you are more bashful than I supposed you would be, after the dots and dashes we have slung. But then it’s easier to buzz on the wire than it is to talk, isn’t it? For all a fellow has to do is to take up a book or a paper, pick things out to say, and go it without exercising his own brains!”
At these words, that explained the previous incomprehensible difference between the distant C and present person, the realization of the companionship, the romance, the friendship gone to wreck on this reef of musk and bear’s-grease came over Nattie with a rush, and for a moment so affected her that she could hardly restrain her tears. And yet, after all, was not C, her C, the C whom she knew by his conversation only—“picked out of books!”—an unreal, intangible being, and not this so different person who claimed his identity?
“I think we astonished some of them on the wire with all the stuff we had over!” went on with his monologue the knight of the collapsed romance, who, not being troubled with fine sensibilities, had no idea of the feelings under which she was laboring.
“Yes—I—doubtless!” stammered Nattie, and turned very red, as, suddenly remembering the tenor of some of what he so elegantly termed “stuff,” the appalling thought, what if he should say “my dear?” presented itself in all its horrors, and the idea punished her for that girlish imprudence in allowing the familiarity from afar.
Evidently he noticed the access of color, and attributed it to his own fascinations, for he smiled complacently as he said,
“I wish I had longer to stay with you, but my train goes in five minutes.” Nattie breathed a sigh of relief. “Too bad, isn’t it? But I will come again some time! By the way,” a cunning expression that seemed uncalled-for crossing over his face, “don’t say anything on the wire about my being here today, will you? I don’t want anyone to know. Let them think I was at B a.”
“Certainly not!” replied Nattie, with an alacrity born of the knowledge that she should
