y, prosperous establishment with a steady, prosperous connection.
It never advertised, never cleaned up, nor modernized, nor did anything,
as far as I could ever see, except exist and prosper. I don't know who
owned it--Robinson perhaps--whether it was a company, or anything else
about it. I had stayed in it once or twice, and a four-poster bed in a
sort of giant crypt, with plenty of comfort so long as you didn't step
on the flags in your bare feet, a quiet, well-cooked breakfast, and
moderate charges were my chief memories of the establishment. _You_
would never find it if you went to Genoa. You and other tourists would
be in the Bristol or the Savoy or the Miramare up on the heights above
the railroad terminal. You would never find the Hotel Robinsons of
Europe. They are like a mirage to the tourists, those quiet, clean,
cheap hotels. You hear of them and perhaps catch a glimpse of them in
the distance, and you press on, and find they have vanished. They have
become dear, and noisy, and flashy, and are waiting for you at the
station with a brand-new motor omnibus! Humph!

"A woman came out of a little glazed office, a woman dressed in black
plush, as it seemed to me, with list slippers on her feet and a mangy
old fur wrap over her arms and across the small of her back. Perhaps it
was the unusual state of mind I was in; but to me she had the appearance
of a discontented Sibyl, a Sibyl who had been waiting for years for
somebody to make an offer for her books. Nobody, apparently, had ever
come, and she had to put up with me, who only wanted Doctor West. I was
just asking about him when we tumbled back into the Twentieth Century.
The telephone bell rang in the office.

"The Hotel Robinson had once been a palace, a marble palace with marble
walls a couple of feet thick and staircases like a stonecutter's
nightmare. The place was feudal. A coat-of-arms and a hat, in marble,
still balanced themselves over the portico--Robinson's perhaps. I
suppose the little glazed office was the sentry-box in the old days,
where mendicants got their doles and tall freelances from Germany
applied for a situation. May be. I looked through the glass partition
and saw the woman bending forward, the telephone to her ear, her hand
held out over a little charcoal brazier, her lips moving inaudibly, her
eyes nearly closed, as though she were weaving a spell.

"I was beginning to feel cold when she rang off and came out again.
'Doctor West? I've