We asked the way to Mrs. Blake’s and then happened to remark that it was curious a town as up-to-date as this one had no good hotel. He lost his drawl immediately: “No good hotel? Well, I just guess there is a good hotel! The Collier Inn is just across that street and around the corner. It’s a fine hotel.”
We cheered up instantly. But why hadn’t he told us that sooner? He thought that “considerin’ we had asked for a boarding-house, mebbe th’ hotel it was too high-priced for us, but it was a fine hotel if we didn’t mind the cost.”
I don’t know how we had missed it. It was a fair-sized yellow brick building on a corner, a rather typical small-town commercial hotel. I went in expecting dingy darkness. The lobby looked like the office in a Maine summer resort. I asked—not that I for a moment expected to get it—for rooms with baths. The proprietor said, “Certainly,” and showed me three new little rooms, each with a little new bathroom attached.
I returned to my companions grinning like a Cheshire cat. It seemed to us as though we had found a veritable Ritz!
CHAPTER XI
IN ROCHELLE
Twenty-four hours in a town like this and we feel as though we knew it and the people intimately. In many ways it suggests a toy-land town. Its streets are so straight and evenly laid, its houses so white and shining, its gardens so green, its shops so freshly painted, its displays in the windows so new, and its people so friendly.
“Strangers in town!” they seem to say to themselves as they look at us, but instead of looking at us in a “wait until we know who you are before we take any notice of you,” they seem quite ready to smile and begin a conversation.
Our most particular friend, as well as our oldest acquaintance, is the fire chief. E. M. has, of course, one or two other particular friends in the garage. If he can only find a mechanic or two to talk to, he is perfectly happy. Celia’s and my chief diversion has been going to the moving picture theaters, which is evidently the fashionable thing to do here. In the evening we saw three real theater parties. One of them was a very important affair; they met in the lobby and went down the aisle two by two; the ladies all had many diamonds, brand-new white-kid gloves quite tight, picture hats, corsage bouquets and boxes of candy.
Celia and I had neither gloves nor hats on, and when we ran into the theater parties, we felt almost like urchins that had been caught wandering into the foyer of the Metropolitan Opera House. Like our hatred of caraway seeds, our love of hatlessness must be a family failing. In Chicago two different papers took the trouble to mention E. M.’s carelessness in the matter of head-covering. “Scorning to wear a hat even on occasions when it is generally considered to be convenable,” said one. The other described him as “such a disciple of fresh air that he was seen driving a big racing machine on Michigan Avenue without a hat!” Yet isn’t it a popular supposition that the West is freer from conventions than the East?