United States or Montenegro ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It had left him in a comfortable, if rather dizzy, condition of benevolence to all created things. He had smiled at the room-clerk as he crossed the lobby, and if he had had a dollar, he would have given it to the boy who took him up in the elevator.
It was something about his room. He caught the word "satisfactory." "Oh, rather, quite!" said Archie. A fussy devil, the room-clerk! He knew perfectly well that Archie found his room satisfactory. These chappies gassed on like this so as to try to make you feel that the management took a personal interest in you. It was part of their job. Archie beamed absently and went in to lunch.
I note these little facts, for the contrast with those of an American hotel which we once assisted in closing, and where the elevator stopped two weeks before we left, and we fell from electricity to naphtha-gas, and even this died out before us except at long intervals in the passages; while there were lightning changes in the service, and a final failure of it till we had to go down and get our own ice-water of the lingering room-clerk, after the last bell-boy had winked out.
With her bag on the seat beside her she set out to find a temporary lodging. When a fourth room-clerk expressed his polite regrets she looked him straight in the eye and said: "I understand. But I can't sleep in the street. You must tell me where I can go." "Well, there's the Ripon over in Seventh Avenue," said he. "Is it respectable?" said she.
Cora thought the Shoreham rooms beautiful, though she took care not to let the room-clerk know she thought so. Ray, always a silent, inarticulate man, was so wordless that Cora took him to task for it in a sibilant aside. "Ray, for heaven's, sake say something. You stand there! I don't know what the man'll think." "A hell of a lot I care what he thinks."
It was evident that, in spite of all he had been saying and doing, a considerable majority of the caucussers were still regarding him as his father's lieutenant. He did not try very hard to remove the impression. It mattered little, in the present crisis, what the various party henchmen thought or believed. It was a sharp disappointment when the room-clerk told him that his father and Mrs.
McVickar's order to the chauffeur was curtly brief, and a little later the vice-president entered the lobby of the Inter-Mountain and shot a brisk question at the room-clerk. "Is Senator Blount in his rooms?" "I think not. He was here a few minutes ago. I'll send a boy to hunt him up for you. You want your usual suite, I suppose, Mr. McVickar?" "No; I'm not stopping overnight.
Have some of this tropical mess?" "Thanks, no. I'm not specially fit today. Had a beastly night of it. Fancy having to keep one's umbrella up in the berth to keep the light from the passage out of one's eyes! I don't believe such a thing could happen on a British steamer. Can't you manage to give me another state-room?" "That's the purser's job; he's the room-clerk," said the captain.
He was disturbed and jumpy, and the sight of Miss Silverton, talking to somebody on a settee in the corner of the hotel lobby, sent him shooting off at right angles and brought him up with a bump against the desk behind which the room-clerk sat. The room-clerk, always of a chatty disposition, was saying something to him, but Archie did not listen. He nodded mechanically.
I note these little facts, for the contrast with those of an American hotel which we once assisted in closing, and where the elevator stopped two weeks before we left, and we fell from electricity to naphtha-gas, and even this died out before us except at long intervals in the passages; while there were lightning changes in the service, and a final failure of it till we had to go down and get our own ice-water of the lingering room-clerk, after the last bell-boy had winked out.
Word Of The Day