dining-room girl could give lessons in walking to the Delsarte
teacher of an Eastern finishing school.

From the day that Birdie Callahan served Ted with the roast
beef medium and the elegant French fried, she appointed herself
monitor over his food and clothes and morals. I wish I could find
words to describe his bitter loneliness. He did not seek
companionship. The men, although not directly avoiding him, seemed
somehow to have pressing business whenever they happened in his
vicinity. The women ignored him. Mrs. Dankworth, still dashing
and still widowed, passed Ted one day and looked fixedly at a point
one inch above his head. In a town like ours the Haley House is
like a big, hospitable clubhouse. The men drop in there the first
thing in the morning, and the last thing at night, to hear the
gossip and buy a cigar and jolly the girl at the cigar counter.
Ted spoke to them when they spoke to him. He began to develop a
certain grim line about the mouth. Jo Haley watched him from afar,
and the longer he watched the kinder and more speculative grew the
look in his eyes. And slowly and surely there grew in the hearts
of our townspeople a certain new respect and admiration for this
boy who was fighting his fight.

Ted got into the habit of taking his meals late, so that
Birdie Callahan could take the time to talk to him.

"Birdie," he said one day, when she brought his soup, "do you
know that you're the only decent woman who'll talk to me? Do you
know what I mean when I say that I'd give the rest of my life if I
could just put my head in my mother's lap and have her muss up my
hair and call me foolish names?"