He filled out the registration card, paid me four dollars, accepted the key from my frigid hand, and turned to give me one last contemptuous glance before he stepped out of the office.
I sank onto the davenport, weak with relief that my initiation into the horrors of cabin-renting was over.
I suppose the affliction from which I suffered would be called customerphobia. Such a word, if it existed, would be defined in the dictionary as "a morbid fear of customers." No doubt in extreme cases the victim would run shrieking at the sight of a customer. (As a matter of fact, I had had to exert a lot of self-control to keep from doing that very thing!) I grace the ailment by the coining of a name only because I discovered others can suffer from it too. Grandma, later, was to go through a violent attack of it, with much more disastrous results.
The next car that drove in that night disgorged a dark, trim looking man with big ears who demanded, "How mocha get two people?"
"Four dollars," I said.
"How mocha get three people, four people?"
"Five dollars and a half; six-fifty for four people," I said. "I wanna to buy it," the man declared.
"All right," I said indulgently. "Just fill out this registration card."
"No, no--no, no no!" he cried, shoving the registration card away in horror. "I means, I wanna to buy it, I wanna to buy it to belong to me. I got thirty thousand dollars down pay. You wanna to sell your motel?"
"Well," I hedged, "we hadn't really thought of selling. How much did you want to pay?"