Eldon alone failed to come forward with good wishes, and Bret was unreasonable enough to take umbrage at that. Why did Eldon remain aloof? Was he jealous? What right had he to be jealous?
Altogether, the bridegroom was doing his best to make rough weather of his halcyon sea. Sheila was at her wits’ end to cheer him who should have been cheering her.
At noon a few sandwiches of the railroad sort were obtained by a dash to a station lunch-counter. Bret apologized to Sheila, but she assured him that he was not to blame and was not to mind such little troubles; they were part of the business. He minded them none the less and he hated the business.
The town of Petoskey, when they reached it, did not please him in any respect. The hotel pleased him less. When he asked for two rooms with bath the clerk snickered and gave him one without. He explained with contempt, “They’s a bath-room right handy down the hall and baths are a quarter extry.”
It was a riddle whether it were cleanlier to keep the grime one had or fly to a bath-room one knew not of. When Bret and Sheila appeared at the screen door which kept the flies in the dining-room they were beckoned down the line by an Amazonian head waitress. She planted them among a group of grangers who stared at Sheila and picked their teeth snappily.
The dinner was a small-hotel dinner—a little bit of a lot of things in a flotilla of small dishes.
The audience at the theater was sparse and indifferent. The play had begun to bore Winfield. It irritated him to see Sheila repeating the same love-scenes night after night—especially with that man Eldon.
After the play supper was to be had nowhere except at a cheap and ill-conditioned little all-night restaurant where there was nothing to eat but egg sandwiches and pie, the pastry thicker and hardly more digestible than the resounding stone china it was served on.
The bedroom at the hotel was ill ventilated, the plush furniture greasy, the linen coarse, and the towels few and new. Bret declared it outrageous that his beautiful, his exquisite bride should be so shabbily housed, fed like a beggar, and bedded like a poor relation. Almost all of his ill temper was on her account, and she could not but love him for it.
After a dolefully realistic night came again the poignant tragedy of early rising, another gulped breakfast, another dash for the train. The driver of the hack never came. Bret and Sheila waited for him till it was necessary to run all the way to the station. The station was handier to the railroad than to the hotel. Since red-caps were an institution unknown to Petoskey, they carried their own baggage.