s of the
desired amount, and she is often three or four guineas to the good or to
the bad. One of her difficulties lies in her inability to remember
that in English money it makes a difference where you place a figure,
whether, in the pound, shilling, or pence column. Having been educated
on the theory that a six is a six the world over, she charged me with
sixty shillings' worth of Apollinaris in one week. I pounced on the
error, and found that she had jotted down each pint in the shilling
instead of in the pence column.

After Francesca had broken ground on the bill in this way, Salemina, on
the next leisure evening, draws a large armchair under the lamp and puts
on her eye-glasses. We perch on either arm, and, after identifying our
own extras, we summon the butler to identify his. There are a good
many that belong to him or to the landlady; of that fact we are always
convinced before he proves to the contrary. We can never see (until he
makes us see) why the breakfasts on the 8th should be four shillings
each because we had strawberries, if on the 8th we find strawberries
charged in the luncheon column and also in the column of desserts and
ices. And then there are the peripatetic lemon squashes. Dawson calls
them 'still' lemon squashes because they are made with water, not with
soda or seltzer or vichy, but they are particularly badly named. 'Still'
forsooth! when one of them will leap from place to place, appearing
now in the column of mineral waters and now in the spirits, now in the
suppers, and again in the sundries. We might as well drink Chablis or
Pommery by the time one of these still squashes has ceased wandering,
and charging itself at each station. The force of Dawson's intellect is
such that he makes all this moral turbidity as clear as crystal while
he remains in evidence. His bodily presence has a kind of illuminating
power, and all the errors that we fancy we have found he traces to their
original source, which is always in our suspicious and inexperienced
minds. As he leaves the room he points out some proof of unexampled
magnanimity on the part of the hotel; as, for instance, the fact that
the management has not charged a penny for sending up Miss Monroe's
breakfast trays. Francesca impulsively presses two shillings into his
honest hand and remembers afterwards that only one breakfast was served
in our bedrooms during that particular week, and that it was mine, not
hers.

The Paid Out column is an