"'Well, you needn't bother to wait if you're in a hurry,' I answered, testily, going down the shrouded gangway.
"Oh, that's not what I meant,' he said, coming after me smartly, buttoning up his coat and taking out his gloves. 'Fact is, Mister,' he went on, 'I'd take it as a favour—this is the quickest way up to Hotel Robinson—if you'd give me an introduction to your captain.'
"I looked at him astounded, all at sea.
"'Representing Babbolini's,' he added, feeling in his pocket for a card. 'Course, any business done's between ourselves. We have a big connection and can always give satisfaction.'
"So you see how the mere contact of these people contaminates. He was trying to make me his tout to the Corydon, me, the once future Prime Minister of England, the child of many prayers! You may say, how were the mighty fallen! Indeed, I was ashamed. I said nothing.
"'Of course,' said little Sachs, his pimpled, dough-coloured face close to mine. 'Of course, if you don't care to speak to the Captain, the Chief Steward....'
"There was a trolley car station just outside the gates of the Dogana, and I halted there and said to him:
"'Look here, don't you worry to come any farther with me. You've got business to attend to, I dare say. Run right along and attend to it. Good morning.'
"I was none the better for this encounter when I finally reached the Hotel Robinson and stood in an entrance-hall that was high and dark and as cold as an ice box. I felt humiliated as well as depressed. They say people take a man at his own valuation. People don't. They average their own experience, and the answer is never very high.
"The Hotel Robinson was one of those rather shabby, half-hotel, half-pension affairs which seem to hang on year after year with any visible means of support. I say 'seem.' As a matter of fact it was a steady, prosperous establishment with a steady, prosperous connection. It never advertised, never cleaned up, nor modernized, nor did anything, as far as I could ever see, except exist and prosper. I don't know who owned it—Robinson perhaps—whether it was a company, or anything else about it. I had stayed in it once or twice, and a four-poster bed in a sort of giant crypt, with plenty of comfort so long as you didn't step on the flags in your bare feet, a quiet, well-cooked breakfast, and moderate charges were my chief memories of the establishment. You would never find it if you went to Genoa. You and other tourists would be in the Bristol or the Savoy or the Miramare up on the heights above the railroad terminal. You would never find the Hotel Robinsons of Europe. They are like a mirage to the tourists, those quiet, clean, cheap hotels. You hear of them and perhaps catch a glimpse of them in the distance, and you press on, and find they have vanished. They have become dear, and noisy, and flashy, and are waiting for you at the station with a brand-new motor omnibus! Humph!