We often have trouble remembering to ask them, though. I prodded Grant in the back and hissed again, "Ask them if they want twin beds!"
"Do you want twin beds?" Grant said into the telephone mouthpiece. And then, to my amazement, he began to blush. He concluded the conversation hurriedly and with confusion, and then he turned to me.
"After this, will you leave me alone once when I'm telephoning?" he asked. "The man told me right away he wanted to reserve a cabin for his honeymoon. And then you quick pester me into asking him if he wants twin beds!"
Grant rented a cabin to a gushy, heavily upholstered woman, and we picked up our conversation where we had left off. "People certainly have a lot of different subjects to talk about while they register," I remarked.
"She certainly did have," Grant replied. "More than most." The principal topics of conversation are weather (both "here" and "where we came from") traveling conditions, and motels. Frequently an out-of-state customer will linger in the office to complain about the search that was made of his luggage and belongings at the border. And occasionally a customer will take the opportunity to expound his entire philosophy of life.
"We're missing a bet," Grant said, "by not having another business or two as a sideline. We could make a fortune selling the little things people leave behind and never call for--tooth brushes, bobby pins, things like that. And," he added bitterly, "we could sell wigs, and pillows stuffed with human hair."
His worst objection to cleaning the bathrooms in the cabins is the hair that is usually all over the sink and floor. He has often talked, in fact, of trying to get a law passed that would bar women from motels. Scattered bobbypins, lipstick smears on towels, hair and powder would be automatically eliminated in that way. (So would most of our income.)
Worse than hair, in my opinion, are ashes (the scattering of which is a pastime engaged in by more men than women.) Both sexes sprinkle them blithely all over the cabins--a trifle more thickly in the general neighborhood of ashtrays. That part of "ring a round the rosy" which goes "ashes, ashes, all fall down!" was probably written by a cabin-cleaner-upper as she fell down, exhausted, after removing the results of an average smokefest.
If ever the WCTU is supplemented by an organization to squelch dat ole debbil Nicotine, I shall join it. I shall be one of its most vociferous members, agitating violently for the suppression of tobacco, and for the relegation to dungeons of those whose lips, pockets, or thoughts are contaminated by cigarettes.
Grant and I had been in bed for about ten minutes when the doorbell rang. It was the male half of the rigid old couple to whom I had rented Mr. Hawkins' cabin. The door between the living room and the office was slightly ajar, and when Grant answered the bell I proceeded to engage in my favorite pastime--eavesdropping.