“No,” snapped flint-face. “We’ve had all we’re going to take—guests putting their keys in upside down. We’re going to stop it. You’ll have to wait until Jack gets off. Then if he wants to help you it’s no affair of ours what he does in his free time.”
“When do you get off?” I asked the operator.
“Six o’clock.”
It was then seventeen minutes of three. Three hours and seventeen minutes to wait! The tight sensation in my face had passed into a sharp stinging burning that every minute was growing more and more intense. Three hours and seventeen minutes! The doctors had cautioned me against allowing erysipelas to get to my eyes.
I begged that woman as though begging for my life—for I believed that I begged for my sight. It had absolutely no effect on her. When I asked for the manager she laughed at me.
“Miss Diggs is resting,” she told me, and she chuckled with delight. “You disturb her Sunday-afternoon nap and she would have your key taken out the lock, and tomorrow morning she’ll have you moved out the house. If guests don’t like our rules they can leave. We’ve got dozens on our waiting-list ready to take your place.”
Despairing of getting the woman to change her mind, I stepped into the hot little reception-room and took my seat. It was stifling. I could see the sun beaming through the windows of the library and the dance-hall on the other side of the exchange, so I knew they were still hotter. My face was like a red-hot blaze, and no tooth ever ached as painfully as my whole head.
Putting my pride in my pocket I crept out and asked the woman to let me have five cents to telephone to a drug-store. I reminded her that my pocketbook was locked in my room, then that I was a friend of Miss Stafford, who had lived at the Jane Leonard for nearly five years.
“Why don’t you borrow of Miss Stafford?”
“You know yourself she is not here,” I wailed. “You told me so yesterday when I came in. Said she wouldn’t be back from her vacation until to-morrow. I gave you a note to be delivered as soon as she arrived.”