r dinner there was always
soup, two kinds of meat, potatoes, vegetables, dessert, ice tea, milk,
or coffee. For supper there was soup again, meat or fish, potatoes, a
salad, and dessert, and the same variety of drinkables to choose from.
Once I was late at lunch and ate with the help's help. The woman who
dished up the vegetables was in a fearful humor that day. People had
been complaining about the food. "They make me sick!" she grunted.
"They jus' oughta try the ---- Hotel. I worked in their help's dinin'
room for four years and we hardly ever seen a piece of meat, and as
for eggs--I'm tellin' ya a girl was lucky if she seen a egg them four
years."

The people in our dining room were like the people in every dining
room: some were sociable and talked to their neighbors, some were not
sociable at all. There was no regular way of seating. Some meals you
found yourself at a table where all was laughter and conversation. The
next meal, among the same number of people, not one word would be
spoken. "Pass the salt" would grow to sound warm and chummy.

Half an hour was the time allowed everyone for meals. With a friendly
crowd at the table that half hour flew. Otherwise, there was no way of
using up half an hour just eating. And then what?

After a couple of days, some one mentioned the recreation room.
Indeed, what's in a name? Chairs were there, two or three settees, a
piano, a victrola, a Christy picture, a map of South America, the
dying soldier's prayer, and three different sad and colored pictures
of Christ. Under one of these was pinned a slip of paper, and in
homemade printing the worthy admonition:

"No cursing no stealing when tempted look on his kindly face."

There were all these things, but no girls. Once in a while a forlorn
bunch of age would sit humped in a chair, now and then a victrola
record sang forth its worn contents, twice the piano was heard. After
some ten days my large fat friend from the help's pantry informed me
that she and I weren't supposed to be there--the recreation room was
only for chambermaids and like as not any day we'd find the door
locked. Sure enough, my last day at the hotel I sneaked around in the
middle of the afternoon, as usual, to see what gossip I could pick up,
and the door was locked. But I made the recreation room pay for itself
as far as I was concerned. Every day I managed to pick up choice
morsels of gossip there that was grist to my mill.

After my first supper I