these spring days.
Today at noon I would like to have gone up on the grass in Union Square
and taken my shoes off. Why didn't I? Not because of the police--but
Grundy.

Now a Piute Indian woman could have done it. Her stockings too. A Piute
Indian woman when she's tired she sits down right in the street, right
where she's tired. But you and I, when we are weary we may sigh--"Wish
I could sit down." But we can't, not until we've gone down the street
and up in the elevator to some particular place where Grundy says we may
sit.

The most significant thing about that man on the grass was that he was
in the heart of a great city. Cities are like homes. Some you're
comfortable in--some you're not. Now, San Francisco, it is a real city,
with all the metropolitan lares and penates, dignified and vividly
active. And yet there is no city in the country whose children may be as
"at home" as here. It is the only city I know of that has forgotten to
provide itself with nasty little "Keep Off The Grass" signs. It will
probably never be an altogether prohibition town.

Stopping at the Fairmont

It is best to say at the very beginning that if one is tremendously
wealthy he will not enjoy this dissertation on staying at high class
hotels. If one has more than two bathrooms in his home and can afford
chicken when it is not Sunday and turkey when it is not Christmas and
could stay at the Fairmont all winter if he preferred, then these words
will mean nothing to him.

She has gone, this friend of mine. All winter she has been staying at
the Fairmont. Much of the time I, too, have been staying at the Fairmont
as her guest. So it is with a sense of double bereavement that I write.

Talk to me no more of the comfort of cozy little homes. Give me a hotel
where I am treated as though I were a Somebody. Where I have but to
press a button and a liveried servant comes running as though I were
Mary, Queen of England, or Clara Kimball Young. And plenty of hot water
for baths and lots of enormous towels and, as soon as one's butter is
gone, another piece, and fresh butter at that. Pitchers of ice water and
a strapping big man standing so solicitously and watching one's every
mouthful. It makes me feel as though I were the Shah of Persia. At home
I don't feel at all like the Shah of Persia.

I came across something the other day that Boswell quotes Dr. Johnson as
saying on this same subject: "There is no private house in which people