"Ah, well, the poor hotel—it is war time," sighed Aunt Roberta, trying to excuse the discomforts of the place.
But when they began their search for an apartment they soon made a discovery of moment. The gay life of the city, so attractive to the American visitor, might be at low ebb; nevertheless there were many Americans, as well as other foreigners, living in Paris. Visitors benevolent; families of those Americans serving at the front, and there were at this time nearly twenty-five thousand from the United States serving France in one capacity or another; people driven out of the actual zone of warfare and able to live in the capital. And all, it seemed, were living in furnished apartments.
They looked and looked for two foot-wearying, brain-fagging days. Always Aunt Roberta's house-wifely soul was seared by some lack in the arrangement of those rooms they saw, or she was horrified by the slovenliness of the halls, or she suspected vermin.
"Enough!" cried Belinda, at last, and with energy. "We cannot refuse to lease an apartment because you do not like the cut of the concierge's nightcap. Time is being lost. I must get to work; but I must see you settled first."
"But my dear Belinda!" wailed the good woman. "The bath in that last place was—was archaic!"
"If you wished a modern bath in a thirty-dollar apartment you should have remained in America," declared her niece, and that was almost as "catty" a retort as she was capable of making.
Aunt Roberta had already been subdued by discouragement. The next morning they took the very first place that offered. It was on a good street, but the building, or "hotel," itself presented an air of shabby gentility that should have warned them both that it had long since harbored more guests than rent-paying ones.
The concierge was a dried, little, apple-cheeked man—too old for service in the army; a hungry-looking little man who was so eager for small change that he bewailed to them on first acquaintance this disability that kept him from earning a sou a day as a soldier of France.
"I am deprived of my rights by age, Mademoiselle," he said to Belinda—"the affliction of years. Yet am I not spry and active?"
"If he is," complained Aunt Roberta in private, "why does he not scrub these steps?"