pastry cook to H.G. Featherstone, lessee-director, could vouch
for Martha Foote's serene unacidulation.

* * * * *

Don't gather from this that Martha Foote was a beaming, motherly person
who called you dearie. Neither was she one of those managerial and
magnificent blonde beings occasionally encountered in hotel corridors,
engaged in addressing strident remarks to a damp and crawling huddle of
calico that is doing something sloppy to the woodwork. Perhaps the
shortest cut to Martha Foote's character is through Martha Foote's
bedroom. (Twelfth floor. Turn to your left. That's it; 1246. Come in!)

In the long years of its growth and success the Senate Hotel had known
the usual growing pains. Starting with walnut and red plush it had, in
its adolescence, broken out all over into brass beds and birds'-eye
maple. This, in turn, had vanished before mahogany veneer and brocade.
Hardly had the white scratches on these ruddy surfaces been doctored by
the house painter when--whisk! Away with that sombre stuff! And in
minced a whole troupe of near-French furnishings; cream enamel beds,
cane-backed; spindle-legged dressing tables before which it was
impossible to dress; perilous chairs with raspberry complexions. Through
all these changes Martha Foote, in her big, bright twelfth floor room,
had clung to her old black walnut set.

The bed, to begin with, was a massive, towering edifice with a headboard
that scraped the lofty ceiling. Head and foot-board were fretted and
carved with great blobs representing grapes, and cornucopias, and
tendrils, and knobs and other bedevilments of the cabinet-maker's craft.
It had been polished and rubbed until now it shone like soft brown
satin. There was a monumental dresser too, with a liver-coloured marble
top. Along the wall, near the windows, was a couch; a heavy, wheezing,
fat-armed couch decked out in white ruffled cushions. I suppose the mere
statement that, in Chicago, Illinois, Martha Foote kept these cushions
always crisply white, would make any further characterization
superfluous. The couch made you think of a plump grandmother of bygone
days, a beruffled white fichu across her ample, comfortable bosom. Then
there was the writing desk; a substantial structure that bore no
relation to the pindling rose-and-cream affairs that graced the guest
rooms. It was the solid sort of desk at which an English novelist of the
three-volume school might have written a