d to
hear him tell it you'd think he was the guy that put the "will" in the
Willard. But he's a credit-grabber, that's what he is. Makes me
think-- Nev' forget one time I was up in Boston and I met a coon porter
and he told me he was a friend of the president of the Pullman Company
and had persuaded him to put on steel cars. Bet a hat he believed it
himself. That's 'bout like this fellow. He's going to get the razoo....
Gee! I hope you ain't a friend of his."

Una had perfectly learned the Boeotian dialect so strangely spoken by
Mr. Sidney, and she was able to reply:

"Oh no, no indeed! He ought to be fired. He gave me a room as though he
were the superintendent of a free lodging-house."

"But it's so hard to get trained employees that I hate to even let _him_
go. Just to show you the way things go, just when I was trying to swing
a deal for a new hotel, I had to bust off negotiations and go and train
a new crew of chambermaids at Sandsonville myself. You'd died laughing
to seen _me_ making beds and teaching those birds to clean a spittador,
beggin' your pardon, but it certainly was some show, and I do, by gum!
know a traveling-man likes his bed tucked in at the foot! Oh, it's
fierce! The traveling public kicks if they get bum service, and the help
kick if you demand any service from 'em, and the boss gets it right in
the collar-button both ways from the ace."

"Well, I'm going to tell you how to have trained service and how to make
your hotels distinctive. They're good hotels, as hotels go, and you
really do give people good coffee and good beds and credit conveniences,
as you promise, but your hotels are not distinctive. I'm going to tell
you how to make them so."

Una had waited till Mr. Sidney had disposed of his soup and filet
mignon. She spoke deliberately, almost sternly. She reached for her new
silver link bag, drew out immaculate typewritten schedules, and while he
gaped she read to him precisely the faults of each of the hotels, her
suggested remedies, and her general ideas of hotels, with less
cuspidors, more originality, and a room where traveling-men could be at
home on a rainy Sunday.

"Now you know, and I know," she wound up, "that the proprietor's ideal
of a hotel is one to which traveling-men will travel sixty miles on
Saturday evening, in order to spend Sunday there. You take my
recommendations and you'll have that kind of hotels. At the same time
women will be tempted there and the local trade