She looked vaguely puzzled. Then in a moment she said, with obvious intention to be kind: “Don’t you think you better just leave a rising call? Because maybe you will feel all right in the morning and’ll want to come down for your breakfast.”
We also found another original idea in hotel service. At the Chamberlain we were told our rooms would be two dollars and a half apiece, but our bill was two-fifty for one and five-fifty for the other two. When I asked why, the clerk said: “Didn’t you have the door open between?”
“Certainly we did.”
“Well, you see,” he explained, “that makes the room en suite, so it is fifty cents extra.”
The interest people take in population is very amazing to us. Ask any New Yorker the city’s population and two out of five will shrug their shoulders. Ask anyone out here—man, woman or child—you will get on the spot the figures of the last census—plus the imagined increase since!
At random I asked two young girls looking in a milliner’s window. In the midst of their exclamations about the “swellness” of a black and white hat they answered in unison, “Eighty-six thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight.”
“A Mrs. Simson had twins this morning—that makes eighty-six thousand, three hundred and seventy, doesn’t it?”
“Why, yes—that’s so,” beamed one of them.
“But six deaths would make it six less!”
For a moment they looked disconcerted, then the other answered brightly: “Oh, the deaths’ll come off the next census taking, and there’ll be ever so many births before that!”