The thermometer was at about thirty when we left home, so I could think of nothing but serge coats of heavy weight, plaited skirts also nice and warm, sweaters of various thicknesses, and fur coats. There came almost a break in a heretofore happy family when I insisted that over the Rocky Mountains our “chauffeur” would need his heaviest coat. He refused to take a coonskin—Heaven praise his intuition on that!—but obligingly brought a huge ulster. We had not gone fifty miles from New York when the sun came out hot and has ever since then been trying to show how heat is produced in the tropics. Our car is loaded down with wraps for the Rockies, and in this sweltering heat not one thin dress have I brought.
In every way my clothes are a trial and disappointment. A taffeta afternoon dress that was intended to give me a smart appearance whenever I might want to look otherwise than as a bedraggled tripper comes out of the trunk looking like crinkled crepon. I thought of pretending that it was crinkled crepon, but its crinkle was somehow not quite right in evenness or design. There is also a coat and skirt of a basket weave material that I had made especially to be serviceable motoring. I don’t know what sort of dresses would have packed better, but I am sure none could be worse. In fact, I unhesitatingly challenge these two of mine against the most perishable clothes that anyone can produce, that mine will wrinkle more and deeper and sooner than any others in existence.
I have, however, found one small article that I happen to have brought, a great success, and that is a lace veil with a good deal of pattern—one of those things that make you look as though something queer was the matter with your face—unless there is something the matter with your face, in which case it takes all the blame. In doing the same thing every day you find you shake down to a rather regular system. As we come into the outskirts of the city where we are to spend the night, I take off, in the car, my goggles and the swathing of veils that I wear touring, and put on the lace one. The transformation from blown-about hair and dusty face to a tidy disguise of all blemishes is quite miraculous. Dusters are ugly things, but as every woman who motors knows, there is nothing so practical. I don’t think personally that silk ones can be compared for sense and comfort with those of dust-colored linen or cotton. Silk sheds the dust perhaps a little better, but wrinkles more. At all events, I find that by putting my lace veil on and taking my duster off, I can walk up to the desk and register without being taken for a vagrant. The lady who was traveling with us is one of those aggravating women who stay tidy. She keeps her gloves on and her hands dustless. But even she saw the transforming possibilities of a lace veil and soon bought one too.
Hotels, however, are very lenient in the matter of the appearance of guests, because of all the begrimed-looking tramps, our “chauffeur” after driving ten hours or so in the sifting dust is the grimiest. The only reason why he is not taken for a professional driver is because no one would hire anyone so disreputable-looking.
In one hotel, though, a grimy working mechanic having gone up in the elevator and a strange, perfectly well turned out person having come down, the confused clerk asked where the chauffeur went and did the new gentleman want a room?
CHAPTER VI
DID ANYBODY SAY “CHICKEN”?
Sometimes we take luncheon with us and sometimes we don’t. If we do, we see nice, clean-looking places on the road, such as the Parmly at Plainsville between Erie and Cleveland and the Avelon at Norwalk between Cleveland and Toledo; if we don’t we find nothing but hotels of the saloon-front and ladies’-entrance-in-the-back variety.
Between South Bend and Chicago we had not intended to stop, but found ourselves rather hungry and unwilling to wait until about three o’clock to lunch in Chicago. We looked in the Blue Book and saw the advertisement of a restaurant a few miles ahead. “Mrs. Seth Brown. Chicken dinners a specialty.” That is not her real name.