And Anna bore herself like a grand duchess, and had all the airs of twenty titled ladies, when next morning she stepped out of the elevator into the broad hall, the train of her blue morning dress sweeping far behind her, and a soft, fleecy white shawl wrapped gracefully and negligently around her. She knew she was creating a sensation, and her voice, never very low, was pitched a little higher as she asked the clerk if he had no private parlors—no sitting-rooms attached to the bedrooms. The clerk was very sorry, but there were no suites of rooms, he said; they were seldom called for, as the guests generally preferred sitting in the parlor, and hall, and upon the piazzas.
“Yes, but I do not,” Anna replied, in her most supercilious tone; “and I think it very strange that a hotel like this should have no suites of rooms; but possibly you can obviate that difficulty by giving us an extra room. I should like the one adjoining mine. It will not be much trouble to take out the bed and convert it into a parlor.”
She spoke as if the thing were settled, and was moving away, when the clerk stopped her by saying:
“But, madam, it is impossible to give you No. —, as it is already occupied by Miss Hetherton.”
“Miss Hetherton! What Miss Hetherton, pray?” and Anna’s voice lost the lady-like tone to which she had been trying to bring it since her accession of dignity.
Quietly turning the pages of the book back to a previous date, the clerk pointed to the entry, “Miss Hetherton, Merrivale, Mass.,” while Anna repeated, scornfully:
“‘Miss Hetherton, Merrivale Mass.!’ Is she here, and alone?” while the elevating of her eyebrows, and the significant shrug of her shoulders expressed more than her words.
“You know the lady, then?” the clerk ventured to say; for, in spite of Anna’s diamonds and airs, there was something about her which told him he could take more liberty with her than with many another guest of far less pretension.
“Know her? Yes; but I did not expect to find her here,” Anna answered, and then swept on toward the dining-room door, where her husband was waiting for her.
Everybody looked up as she entered the room, and many whispers and many glances were exchanged as she passed on to her seat, which was quite at the end of the long hall; and so acute is the Yankee perception of the true and the false, the washed metal and the real, that even before she had been settled in her chair by her attentive husband, the verdict passed upon her by those for whose opinion she would care the most was, “Not a genuine lady, whatever her rank may be.” There was too much show and arrogance about her, and the diamonds in her ears, and, more than all, the heavy cross and chain she wore, were sadly out of place at the breakfast-table.