“You needn’t thank me for showing you the way, as you evidently don’t know it,” said Lucy; “that is, unless you have professional reasons for going down in the luggage lift with trunks, baby wagons, clothes-baskets, and scrubbing pails. No, you needn’t raise your eyebrows, I’m not English or infected with Anglomania either, simply I’m to the point, and _luggage lift_ is a much more smooth and pronounceable expression than baggage elevator, don’t you think?
“To the right—there you are! Not running? Why, the thing was all right when I came in not an hour ago, but I’ve noticed that the power has a way of giving out, or the machinery needs oiling, about the time the man might be supposed to want an afternoon nap. You’ll have to walk downstairs. Good afternoon. Oh, by the way, do you happen to know Charlie Ashton? I beg his pardon, _Carolus_, though I only promised to call him that at his studio teas. He had a chum at college, he said, with a literary and reformatory streak, who a year ago had cut away from his father’s business, and incidentally his own fortune, and was climbing into journalism, not in at the top story, but up the cellar stairs. I’ve rather forgotten his name. He doesn’t chance to be you, does he?”
“I’m afraid he does, and that Ashton has guyed me unmercifully to you, in spite of all the good turns that he has done me. But as I am myself, you must be his cousin, Miss Dean, of whom he talks so much at the club. I did not quite catch what name Miss Lawton said.”
“I am Lucy Dean, and I dare say that he has talked about me even at so reprehensible a place as the club. Talking about me, I fear, is a bad habit that a great many of my friends have. I also know that he didn’t call me Miss Dean. What club was it? What did he call me? Lucyfer is his pet title—and what did he say?”
“Oh, Miss Dean, it wasn’t the way you mean at all. I was lunching, at his invitation, with him at the Players,—quite by ourselves on my word, and—he—well, he did call you Lucyfer, and said it expressed your stand-off way and all that; but he declared you were the best chum a fellow ever had, and if he wanted a studio entertainment to be a corking success, he always had you pour tea. If I hadn’t been spending all my time the last year climbing up the cellar stairs, as you express it, I should have begged him to ask me to one of the teas; but I’m out of that sort of thing, for good and all, you see.”