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When the portier addressed momma as "Signora" her cup of bliss ran over, and she made up her mind that she felt able, after all, to go down to dinner.
The landlord, in plain clothes, and bareheaded, placed himself on the bottom marble step, abreast the PORTIER, who stood on the other end of the same steps; six or eight waiters, gloved, bareheaded, and wearing their whitest linen, their whitest cravats, and their finest swallow-tails, grouped themselves about these chiefs, but leaving the carpetway clear.
I want you to be my guests, and I'll see about the carriages." He turned to Burnamy: "Will you order them?" "Oh," said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, "the portier will get them." "I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept. Surely, he can't like that man!" said Mrs. March to her husband in their own room. "Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential.
He finally had it taken up, and then he put it down himself and got it right. At this stage of the proceedings, a narrow bright red carpet was unrolled and stretched from the top of the marble steps to the curbstone, along the center of the black carpet. This red path cost the PORTIER more trouble than even the black one had done.
A sense of the past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them.
The hotel keeps a rude skeleton-key on hand, presumably for possible emergencies of this nature; but in manipulating this uncouth instrument le portier actually locks the door, and as the skeleton-key is expected to manage the catch only, and not the lock, this, of course, makes matters infinitely worse.
All was correct, and if of a funereal correctness to me, I am sure this effect was purely subjective. The portier and I ignored together the hour of parting, which we had definitely ascertained and agreed upon, and we exchanged some compliments to the weather, which is now settled, as if we expected to enjoy it long together. I rather dread going in to lunch, however, for I fear the empty places.
I want you to be my guests, and I'll see about the carriages." He turned to Burnamy: "Will you order them?" "Oh," said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, "the portier will get them." "I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept. Surely, he can't like that man!" said Mrs. March to her husband in their own room. "Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential.
The name by which the old miser was known was Kragendorf; but, as the portier sagaciously remarked, there was no knowing, in such cases, whether the name a man bore was his own or somebody's else. This Kragendorf mystery was another source of apparently inexhaustible interest to Paton, who was fertile in suggestions as to how it might be explained or penetrated.
Harmony heard the rattle of the chain as it was stretched across the door inside. Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's windows and Peter's opened toward the back of the house, where in a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits.
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