row the pre-eminence of
the Five Towns Hotel. The forlorn result of one of these efforts--so
immense was it!--had been bought by the municipality and turned into a
Town Hall--supreme instance of the Five Towns' habit of "making things
do!" No effort succeeded. Men would still travel from the ends of the
Five Towns to the bar, the billiard-rooms, the banqueting-halls of the
Five Towns Hotel, where every public or semi-public ceremonial that
included conviviality was obliged to happen if it truly respected
itself.

The Five Towns Hotel had made fortunes, and still made them. It was
large and imposing and sombre. The architect, who knew his business,
had designed staircases, corridors, and accidental alcoves on the
scale of a palace; so that privacy amid publicity could always be
found within its walls. It was superficially old-fashioned, and in
reality modern. It had a genuine chef, with sub-chefs, good waiters
whose sole weakness was linguistic, and an apartment of carven oak
with a vast counterfeit eye that looked down on you from the ceiling.
It was ready for anything--a reception to celebrate the nuptials of
a maid, a lunch to a Cabinet Minister with an axe to grind in the
district, or a sale by auction of house-property with wine _ad
libitum_ to encourage bids.

But its chief social use was perhaps as a retreat for men who were
tired of a world inhabited by two sexes. Sundry of the great hotels
of Britain have forgotten this ancient function, and are as full of
frills, laces, colour, and soft giggles as a London restaurant, so
that in Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow a man in these days has
no safe retreat except the gloominess of a provincial club. The Five
Towns Hotel has held fast to old tradition in this respect. Ladies
were certainly now and then to be seen there, for it was a hotel and
as such enjoyed much custom. But in the main it resembled a monastery.
Men breathed with a new freedom as they entered it. Commandments
reigned there, and their authority was enforced; but they were
not precisely the tables of Moses. The enormous pretence which men
practise for the true benefit of women was abandoned in the Five Towns
Hotel. Domestic sultans who never joked in the drawing-room would
crack with laughter in the Five Towns Hotel, and make others crack,
too. Old men would meet young men on equal terms, and feel rather
pleased at their own ability to do so. And young men shed their youth
there, displaying the hug