New Faces | Page 9

in the first warm days of May. Her collection of
illustrated post-cards had prepared her to identify many of the places
she passed, but once or twice she felt, a little ruefully the difference
between this, her actual first glimpse of New York and the same first
glimpse as she and John had planned it before the benign, but hardly
felicitous, interference of Uncle Richard. This feeling of loneliness was
strongly in the ascendent when the cab stopped under an ornate portico
and two large male creatures, in powdered wigs and white silk
stockings, emerged before her astonished eyes. Open flew her little
door, down jumped the cabman, out rushed other menials and laid
hands upon her baggage. Horses fretted, pedestrians risked their lives,
motors snorted and newsboys clamored as an enormous
police-appearing person assisted her to alight. He had such an air of
having been expecting and longing for her arrival that she wondered
innocently whether John had telephoned about her. This thought
persisted with her until she and her following of baggage-laden pages
drew up before the desk, but it fell from her with a crash when she
encountered the aloof, impersonal, world-weary regard of the presiding
clerk. In all Marjorie's happy life she had never met anything but
welcome. The belle of a fast-growing town is rather a sheltered person,
and not even the most confiding of ingénues could detect a spark of
greeting in the lackadaisical regard of this highly-manicured young
man.
Marjorie began her story, began to recite her lesson: "Outside rooms,
not lower than the fourth nor higher than the eighth floor; the Fifth
Avenue side if possible--and was Mrs. Robert Blake in?"

The lackadaisical young man consulted the register with a disparaging
eye.
"Not staying here," Marjorie understood him to remark.
"Oh, it doesn't matter--but about the rooms?"
"Front!" drawled the young man, and several blue-clad bellboys ceased
from lolling on a bench and approached the desk.
"Register here," commanded the clerk, twirling the big book on its
turn-table toward Marjorie so suddenly that she jumped, and laying his
pink-tinted finger on its first blank line.
"No, thank you," she stammered, "I was not to register until my
husband--" and her heart cried out within her for that she was saying
these new, dear words for the first time to so unresponsive a
stranger--"told me not to register until he should come and see that the
rooms were satisfactory. He will be here presently."
"We have no unsatisfactory rooms," was the answer, followed by:
"Front 625 and 6," and fresh pages and bellboys fell upon the yellow
baggage, and Marjorie, in a hot confusion of counting her property and
wondering how to resent the young man's impertinence, turned to
follow them.
"One moment, madam," the clerk murmured; "name and address,
please." The pages were escaping with the bags, and Mrs. Blake hardly
turned as she answered, according to the habit of her lifetime:
"Underwood, West Hills, N.J.," and flew to the elevator, which had
already swallowed her baggage and the boys. Up to suite Number 625
and 6 she was conducted by her blue-clad attendants, who opened the
windows, pushed the furniture about--then waited; who fetched ice
water, drew down shades--and waited; who closed the windows, drew
up the shades, shifted the baggage from sofa to armchair, unbuckled the
straps of a suitcase, indicated the telephone--and waited; who put the
bags on the bed, opened the windows, pushed the furniture back against

the wall--and waited. Marjorie viewed all these manoeuvres with
amused but unsophisticated eyes. She smiled serenely at the smiling
bellboys--while they waited. She thanked them prettily for their
assistance--and they waited. She dismissed them still prettily, and it is
to be regretted that, in the privacy of the hall, they swore.
She then took possession of her little domain. The clerk, however
unbearably, had spoken the truth, and the rooms were charming. There
could be no question, she decided, of going farther. She spread her
pretty wedding silver on the dressing-table, she hung her negligée with
her hat and coat in the closet. She went down on her knees and
investigated the slide which was to lead shoes to the bootblack; she
tested, with her bridal glove-stretcher, the electrical device in the
bathroom for the heating of curling irons. She studied all the pictures,
drew out all the drawers, examined the furniture and bric-a-brac, and
then she looked at her watch. Only half an hour was gone.
She went to the window and watched the hats of the passing multitude,
noting how short and fore-shortened all the figures seemed and how
queerly the horses passed along beneath her, without visible legs to
move them. Still an hour before John could be expected.
And then their trunks, hers large and his small, made their