Grant didn't see it that way, though. "But what's it for?" he demanded. "What is it?"
I don't see how anyone with such a prosaic, practical nature can get much joy out of life.
I couldn't figure out, myself, what the thing was for, though, so I set it on top of the bookcase beside Mr. Hawkins' nude perfume atomizer.
"It's an ornament, of course," I told Grant haughtily.
Whenever I help out with cleaning the cabins, I have a faintly guilty feeling about being in the cabins in which someone is staying over. The presence of clothes and suitcases, the casual disarray of magazines and cosmetics make me feel as though I am entering a private dwelling in which I have no business to be. And I, like Mrs. Clark and Grant, have often thought about the precarious position we would be in if any of the stay-over guests should complain that possessions left in the cabin while they were gone had disappeared. We are more fortunate than most motel owners, in that we have a maid whose complete honesty is as stanch and unassailable a fact as the existence of the Pyramids. If a guest should tell us that something of his is missing, we never have to deal with the nagging possibility that the maid might have stolen it.
Besides the many trivial things that have been left in the cabins, there have been a few things of real value, including a wallet containing six hundred dollars (which Mrs. Clark turned in to us the instant she found it) and a silver fox coat. We are always glad, in one sense, when such valuable things are left behind; the owners, when they get them back, are so grateful and so impressed with our integrity that they will probably patronize our motel loyally for years to come. The woman who came feverishly back for the silver fox coat was so overwhelmed with gratitude that she promised Grant a job, at whatever time in the future he might need it, at her husband's sanitary belt factory. So in case we ever go broke in the motel business. Grant will be able to go right to work.
One of us accompanies the radio man--at his tactful insistence--when he goes around to take the quarters out of the coin boxes in the radios. It's a task that wastes time, but in a very enjoyable manner. He always wears his shirtsleeves so high that the hinges tattooed on the insides of his elbows are visible, and he talks continually. This time, as we made the rounds of the cabins, he was telling me about a motel in Palm Springs where he had installed some of his radios.
"Ya oughta see the way the dames run around, there in Palm Springs," he said, busily taking the back off a radio. "They wear things they call brassieres with their shorts, see, but it don't do no good. What you can't see sure ain't worth lookin' for. An' most the guys runnin' around in shorts, they're such fat slobs, they need brassieres worse'n the women do. I been around a lot, see, but damned if it don't embarrass me to go to Palm Springs!"
The wiry little man unlocked the coin box and extracted a handful of quarters, dropping them into the cloth sack he carried for the purpose.
"At least, they've given up that silly 'sun time' they tried out a while back. They tried to cheat people out of an extra hour, see, or maybe they was tryin' to give 'em an extra hour, I never figured it out, but anyway it didn't work, so they gave it up."