This Inscription Was To Me A Moment Of Misery Which
I Could Never Go Through With Equanimity.
As the name is written,
and as the request for accommodation is made, half a dozen loungers
look over your name and listen to what you say.
They listen
attentively, and spell your name carefully, but the great man behind
the bar does not seem to listen or to heed you; your destiny is
never imparted to you on the instant. If your wife or any other
woman be with you - the word "lady" is made so absolutely distasteful
in American hotels that I cannot bring myself to use it in writing
of them - she has been carried off to a lady's waiting room, and
there remains in august wretchedness till the great man at the bar
shall have decided on her fate. I have never been quite able to
fathom the mystery of these delays. I think they must have
originated in the necessity of waiting to see what might be the
influx of travelers at the moment, and then have become exaggerated
and brought to their present normal state by the gratified feeling
of almost divine power with which for the time it invests that
despotic arbiter. I have found it always the same, though arriving
with no crowd, by a conveyance of my own, when no other expectant
guests were following me. The great man has listened to my request
in silence, with an imperturbable face, and has usually continued
his conversation with some loafing friend, who at the time is
probably scrutinizing my name in the book.
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