The clerk, or proprietor, was a ray of welcoming attentiveness. Yes, indeed, he had saved rooms with baths for each of us. He was the pink of personal neatness and we hoped the bellboys’ color had perhaps not been chosen with a purpose. Our rooms, however, were brown and sooty, and in my bathroom I wrote the word “dirt” on the washstand with my finger and it showed like a rut in the road. We went down to dinner not expecting much. And, had surprisingly good food in a spotlessly clean dining-room!
When I went to bed the electric lights would not turn on, and as no one answered the bell I gave up ringing and went to bed in the dark. The thermometer was about ninety-five; everything felt gritty, and in front of my eyes blinked mockingly an intermittent electric sign which in letters six feet high flashed all through the night about a snow-white laundry!
I was awakened by a waiter with my breakfast, which couldn’t have been better; clean silver, unchipped china, and the best coffee and toast we had had anywhere! Evidently the man who ran the restaurant was good, and whoever ran the chambermaid was bad, and whoever decorated the place in terra cotta, green, bronze and crimson was criminal! The nice man at the desk was evidently the proprietor; we wondered whether to tell him about the electric light and the bells that did not work, and the good-for-nothing chambermaid, but decided that either he knew it and could not help it or that he did not know it and did not want to! When I went to the office to pay our bill he was so really attentively interested in our welfare that I found myself saying politely: “We have been very comfortable.”
The man’s look of wistfulness changed to one of pitying perplexity: “You have been comfortable! Here?” He smiled as one would smile at a child who was trying to say it did not mind the splinter in its finger.
“I had a delicious breakfast,” I found myself saying enthusiastically. “Really I did. The best toast I have had since I left my home.”
“Did you?” He seemed pleased and interested. “You were lucky.”
His expressionless, dry tone and impersonal smile would have made Hodge in “The Man From Home” even more famous.
“Don’t you mind my feelings,” he said, “you needn’t try to pretend my house is first-class or even second! I’ve seen good hotels, and I know!” He leaned over the desk away from one of the “shoe men.” “It’s about fourth-class; that’s just about what it is.”
“There is just one thing the matter——” I hesitated.
“One, which one?”