e first floor of the
hotel and would cost her twelve-and-six a night. She had taken it for a
week, "But I told them I'd stay a fortnight if I was satisfied, so
reckon they'll do all they can. I'll have breakfast in bed"--she added,
as a climax.

Sec.11

In spite of this, Joanna could not help feeling a little nervous and
lonely when she found herself at the Palace Hotel. It was so very
different from the New Inn at Romney, or the George at Rye, or any other
substantial farmers' ordinary where she ate her dinner on market days.
Of course she had been to the Metropole at Folkestone--whatever place
Joanna visited, whether Brodnyx or Folkestone, she went to the best
hotel--so she was not uninitiated in the mysteries of hotel menus and
lifts and hall porters, and other phenomena that alarm the
simple-minded; but that was many years ago, and it was more years still
since she had slept away from Ansdore, out of her own big bed with its
feather mattress and flowered curtains, so unlike this narrow hotel
arrangement, all box mattress and brass knobs.

The first night she lay miserably awake, wishing she had never come. She
felt shy and lonely and scared and homesick. After the dead stillness of
Ansdore, a stillness which brooded unbroken till dawn, which was the
voice of a thick darkness, she found even this quiet seaside hotel full
of disturbing noise. The hum of the ascending lift far into the night,
the occasional wheels and footsteps on the parade, the restless heaving
roar of the sea, all disturbed the small slumbers that her sense of
alarm and strangeness would let her enjoy. She told herself she would
never sleep a wink in this rackety place, and would have sought comfort
in the resolution to go home the next morning, if she had not had Ellen
to face, and the servants and neighbours to whom she had boasted so
much.

However, when daylight came, and sunshine, and her breakfast-in-bed,
with its shining dish covers and appetizing smells, she felt quite
different, and ate her bacon and eggs with appetite and a thrilling
sense of her own importance. The waitress, for want of a definite order,
had brought her coffee, which somehow made her feel very rakish and
continental, though she would have much preferred tea. When she had
finished breakfast, she wrote a letter to Ellen describing all her
experiences with as much fullness as was compatible with that strange
inhibition which always accompanied her taking up of the