Complain to him, and you complain to deaf ears. He apparently has nothing to do but to loll behind the office counter and improve his finger-nails. Tumultuous rings of various bells leave him unmoved; passionate telephonic appeals he only answers when he chooses. He turns to an agonised public a face like carved wax and eyes like agate, and it recoils. The parting of his hair is a monument to his industry.
When I call on a guest at a big hotel I deliver up my card with hope, because, as the poet rashly sang, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." Then I sit down and wait as near the office as possible, and wistfully watch the elegant leisure of the great man behind the counter. My card has disappeared in the custody of a small boy with a salver, and the chances are that before I see him again he will be a man grown.
After having waited half an hour I venture to intrude on the peace behind the counter, and I am received with a hauteur which puts me in my right place at once. The guest, being merely a number, excites no earthly interest, but the clerk wearily sends another infant in search of the first, and then turns his immaculate back on me, and I am permitted to admire the shiny smoothness of his back hair. I again subside, and in my indignation I make up my mind to complain to the daily Press: Is thy servant a doormat that he should be so downtrodden?
Do not preach about the ancient tyrannies of kings and emperors, and other estimable folks, about whom history has probably told a good many lies, and to these add the further lie that I am happy because I am free and independent. I am not free and independent! Instead, I languish under the tyranny of a hundred thousand tyrants, before whom I grovel and quake. Several of them sleep on my top floor and treat me with much severity.
Instead of thousands of tyrants, give me, rather, one tyrant; I can accommodate existence to him, and it is distinctly more interesting and less complicated.
The problem of existence is its multitude of tyrants. Indeed, how delightful life would be if we were not so tyrannised over by the downtrodden!
The Extravagant Economy of Women
The trouble with women is that they do not know how to spend money. The great majority never have any money, or they are at the mercy of some grim masculine creature, be he father or husband, who demands items—now think of an average man bothering himself about items! It must be a survival of the time when we inhabited harems, or when we were beautiful dames to whom our true knights gave undying love but nothing more substantial; or we rejoiced the souls of the ancient patriarchs though we did not succeed in extracting any cash.
I don't for a moment believe that the lovely Hebrew damsel, Rebecca, had a penny of her own, nor that the peerless Guinevere had half-a-crown (or whatever the coinage was) to buy her Launcelot a love token. And though Scheherazade—that peerless, self-contained, circulating library of a thousand and one volumes—told enough stories to her Sultan to have made the fortune of a modern publisher, she could hardly have made less even if she had had the felicity to write a modern novel. The favourite of the harem would, it is certain, have found a purse a hollow mockery.