“How juh know?”
“Oh—” She merely smiled.
“Well, that guy’s a four-flush. Came to us from the New Willard, and to hear him tell it you’d think he was the guy that put the “will” in the Willard. But he’s a credit-grabber, that’s what he is. Makes me think— Nev’ forget one time I was up in Boston and I met a coon porter and he told me he was a friend of the president of the Pullman Company and had persuaded him to put on steel cars. Bet a hat he believed it himself. That’s’bout like this fellow. He’s going to get the razoo.... Gee! I hope you ain’t a friend of his.”
Una had perfectly learned the Bœotian dialect so strangely spoken by Mr. Sidney, and she was able to reply:
“Oh no, no indeed! He ought to be fired. He gave me a room as though he were the superintendent of a free lodging-house.”
“But it’s so hard to get trained employees that I hate to even let him go. Just to show you the way things go, just when I was trying to swing a deal for a new hotel, I had to bust off negotiations and go and train a new crew of chambermaids at Sandsonville myself. You’d died laughing to seen me making beds and teaching those birds to clean a spittador, beggin’ your pardon, but it certainly was some show, and I do, by gum! know a traveling-man likes his bed tucked in at the foot! Oh, it’s fierce! The traveling public kicks if they get bum service, and the help kick if you demand any service from’em, and the boss gets it right in the collar-button both ways from the ace.”
“Well, I’m going to tell you how to have trained service and how to make your hotels distinctive. They’re good hotels, as hotels go, and you really do give people good coffee and good beds and credit conveniences, as you promise, but your hotels are not distinctive. I’m going to tell you how to make them so.”
Una had waited till Mr. Sidney had disposed of his soup and filet mignon. She spoke deliberately, almost sternly. She reached for her new silver link bag, drew out immaculate typewritten schedules, and while he gaped she read to him precisely the faults of each of the hotels, her suggested remedies, and her general ideas of hotels, with less cuspidors, more originality, and a room where traveling-men could be at home on a rainy Sunday.
“Now you know, and I know,” she wound up, “that the proprietor’s ideal of a hotel is one to which traveling-men will travel sixty miles on Saturday evening, in order to spend Sunday there. You take my recommendations and you’ll have that kind of hotels. At the same time women will be tempted there and the local trade will go there when wife or the cook is away, or they want to give a big dinner.”
“It does sound like it had some possibilities,” said Mr. Sidney, as she stopped for breath, after quite the most impassioned invocation of her life.