“‘WHAT TIME DO YOU THINK THE PERFESH, WHICH STOP HERE, RISES?’”
“It’s all right; it’s very early, earlier than we thought we’d get here. Don’t hurry,” Florimel supplemented Jane with decision. “For goodness’ sake, Jane, now you are here, don’t fade right out! Didn’t I say you’d be like that?” she added in a severe whisper as Jane and she followed their guide to the overwhelming red plush of the Waldorf parlour.
The time of waiting seemed desperately long to both girls. The grandfather clock ticking in the corner—it had been manufactured to sell with a large order of cigars in the most recent of periods—seemed to accomplish less by its seconds than any other clock Jane and Florimel had ever met. At last an hour passed, and twenty minutes followed it. Then the clerk returned with a smiling face and the important manner of a triumphant ambassador.
“You’re to come right up to her room,” he whispered, not because there was any one else there to hear, but because his words were too precious to be scattered broadcast. “I done my best for you, and she’ll see you.”
Jane and Florimel arose at once. Jane was so pale that the clerk noticed it. “Don’t be scared,” he advised her kindly. “She’s easy to get acquainted with.” He took the girls up one flight of stairs and along a dusty corridor, carpeted in red and smelling of ancient histories.
“Here’s the room!” announced the clerk, swinging around a right angle turn in the corridor and pausing before a door at the end of the wing thus reached. “Number 22!” he added, as if announcing the capital prize in a lottery. He knocked for the girls, seeing them overwhelmed, and withdrew with a wink that might have meant anything.
“Stay out!” cried a feminine voice.
Rightly construing this as humour, Jane timidly opened the door. She saw before her a blowsy looking woman, in a pink kimono, its thin quality and flowing amplitude, as well as its heavy, once-white lace trimming, adding to the extreme rotundity of its wearer. Her hair was in curl papers, her feet in soiled pink “mules.” Beyond her sat a small woman, thin and tired looking, but animated, and still another with an indefinite face. Three men also adorned the room, all smoking; one of them was helping the indefinite woman to cram garments, that had not been folded, into a suitcase.
“Well, you pretty pair!” exclaimed the wearer of the pink kimono. “Say, Petey, what d’you know about this? Some lookers to drop in at this hour in a deserted village, what?”