Outside upon the boulevards, cocottes, guides, cabmen, and androgynous young men, touts, and all those who hang about that caravansary where the dulcet Suffolk whine, made sharper by the air of Massachusetts, sounds, passed and repassed.
Smug-faced, black-coated citizens from Buffalo and Albany, and from places like Detroit and Council Bluffs, to which the breath of fashion has not penetrated, scanned the New York Herald, read the glorious news, and, taking off their hats, deigned publicly to recognize the existence of a God, and after standing reverently silent, masticating their green cigars in contemplation of His wondrous ways, to take a drink.
Aquatic plants and ferns known only to hotels, and constituting a sub-family of plants, which by the survival of the ugliest have come at last to stand gas, dust, saliva, and an air befogged with Chypre, grew in the fountain where, in the tepid water, gold fish with swollen eyes, and blotched with patches of unhealthy white, swam to and fro, picking up crumbs and rising to the surface when some one threw a smoked-out cigarette into the basin, in the midst of which a fig-leaved Naiad held a stucco shell.
The corridors were blocked with Saratoga trunks; perspiring porters staggered to and fro, bending beneath the weight of burdens compared to which a sailor’s chest is as a pill-box.
All went well; the tapes clicked off their international lies, detailing all the last quotations of the deep mines upon the Rand, the fall in Spanish Fours; in fact, brought home to those with eyes to see, the way in which the Stock Exchange had put a rascals’ ring around the globe.
Waiters ran to and fro, their ears attuned to every outrage upon French, seeking to find the meaning of the jargons in which they were addressed.
Majestic butlers in black knee-breeches, and girt about the neck with great brass chains, moved slowly up and down, so grave and so respectable that had you laid your hands upon any one of them and made a bishop of him he would have graced the post.
Mysterious, well-dressed men sat down beside you, and after a few words proposed to take you in the evening to show you something new.
Women walked to and fro, glaring at one another as they had all been tigresses, or again, catching each other’s eyes, reddened, and looked ashamed, as if aware, though strangers, that they understood the workings of the other’s heart.
Burano chandeliers and modern tapestry, with red brocade on the two well-upholstered chairs, imparted beauty and a look of wealth, making one feel as if by striking an electric bell a door would open and a troop of half-dressed women file into the court, after the fashion of another kind of inn.