She decided to capture Mr. Sidney. She made plans.
In the spring she took a mysterious two weeks’ leave of absence and journeyed through New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The woman who had quite recently regarded it as an adventure to go to Brooklyn was so absorbed in her Big Idea that she didn’t feel self-conscious even when she talked to men on the train. If they smacked their lips and obviously said to themselves, “Gee! this is easy—not a bad little dame,” she steered them into discussing hotels; what they wanted at hotels and didn’t get; what was their favorite hotel in towns in from fifteen hundred to forty thousand inhabitants, and precisely what details made it the favorite.
She stayed at two or three places a day for at least one meal—hotels in tiny towns she had never heard of, and in larger towns that were fumbling for metropolitanism. She sought out all the summer resorts that were open so early. She talked to travelers, men and women; to hack-drivers and to grocers supplying hotels; to proprietors and their wives; to clerks and waitresses and bell-boys, and unconsidered, observant porters. She read circulars and the catalogues of furniture establishments.
Finally, she visited each of Mr. Bob Sidney’s White Line Hotels. Aside from their arrangements for “accommodations” and credit, their superior cleanliness, good mattresses, and coffee with a real taste, she did not find them preferable to others. In their rows of cuspidors and shouldering desks, and barren offices hung with insurance calendars, and dining-rooms ornamented with portraits of decomposed ducks, they were typical of all the hotels she had seen.
On the train back to New York she formulated her suggestions for hotels, among which, in her own words, were the following:
“(1) Make the offices decent rooms—rem. living-room at Gray Wolf Lodge. Take out desks—guests to register and pay bills in small office off living-room—keep letters there, too. Not much room needed and can’t make pleasant room with miserable old ‘desk’ sticking out into it.
“(2) Cut out the cuspidors. Have special room where drummers can play cards and tell stories and spit. Allow smoking in ‘office,’ but make it pleasant. Rem. chintz and wicker chairs at $3 each. Small round tables with reading-lamps. Maybe fireplace.
“(3) Better pastry and soup and keep coffee up to standard. One surprise in each meal—for example, novel form of eggs, good salad, or canned lobster cocktail. Rem. the same old pork, beans, cornbeef, steak, deadly cold boiled potato everywhere I went.
“(4) More attractive dining-rooms. Esp. small tables for 2 and 4. Cater more to local customers with à la carte menus—not long but good.
“(5) Women housekeepers and pay’em good.