and you follow the trail over
a narrow yellow desert, turn to your right and keep going till you
reach a door with your number on it. When you are in your room, you
see the things that are considered more important than the people.

"There's an entire room set apart for the sole purpose of bathing!--and
the room with the bed in it is separate from the sitting-room. You can
go in one and stay a while, and go in another and stay a while, and
then go in the third--and you have a different feeling for each room
that you're in. I'd rather see everything at once, as I can in my
cabin. And that bed! If my little bed at home could be brought here
and set up beside this hotel wonder, the very walls would cry out....
I wish I could sleep in my little bed tonight, and hear the wind
howling over the mountain.

"The dining-room is the finest thing I ever saw; I doubt if the kings
and queens of old times ever ate in richer surroundings. There are rows
of immense mirrors along the wall and gold borders--and then the
tables! I wonder what would happen if anybody should spread newspapers
on one of these wonderful tables and use them for a tablecloth? At
home, we can just reach out and take what we want off the stove, and
help our plates without rising. It's so different here! After you've
worried over crooked lists of things to eat that you've never heard of,
and have hurried to select so the waiter won't have to lose any time,
the waiter goes away. And when he puts something before you, you don't
know what to call it, because it's been so long, you've forgotten its
name on that awful pasteboard. But there's something pleasant when
you've finished, in just getting up and walking away, not caring who
cleans up the dishes!

"I've been to the opera-house, but it wasn't an opera, it was a play.
That house--I wish you could see it!--the inside, I mean, for outside
it looks like it needs washing. The chairs--well, if you sent that
stool of ours to a university you couldn't train it up to look anything
like those opera-chairs. And the dresses--the diamonds.... Everything
was perfectly lovely except what we had come to see, and my party
thought it was too funny for anything; but it wasn't funny to me. The
story they acted was all about a young couple fooling their parents and
getting married without father and mother knowing, and a baby brought
in at the last that nobody would claim though it was said to be
somebody's that sho