She possessed the invaluable gift of the floor clerk, did Sadie Corn—­that of remembering names and faces.  Though you had registered at the Hotel Magnifique but the night before, for the first time, Sadie Corn would look up at you over her glasses as she laid your key in its proper row, and say:  “Good morning, Mr. Schultz!  Sleep well?”

“Me!” you would stammer, surprised and gratified.  “Me!  Fine!  H’m—­Thanks!” Whereupon you would cross your right foot over your left nonchalantly and enjoy that brief moment’s chat with Floor Clerk Number Two.  You went back to Ishpeming, Michigan, with three new impressions:  The first was that you were becoming a personage of considerable importance.  The second was that the Magnifique realised this great truth and was grateful for your patronage.  The third was that New York was a friendly little hole after all!

Miss Sadie Corn was dean of the Hotel Magnifique’s floor clerks.  The primary requisite in successful floor clerkship is homeliness.  The second is discreet age.  The third is tact.  And for the benefit of those who think the duties of a floor clerk end when she takes your key when you leave your room, and hands it back as you return, it may be mentioned that the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh requisites are diplomacy, ingenuity, unlimited patience and a comprehensive knowledge of human nature.  Ambassadors have been known to keep their jobs on less than that.

She had come to the Magnifique at thirty-three, a plain, spare, sallow woman, with a quiet, capable manner, a pungent trick of the tongue on occasion, a sparse fluff of pale-coloured hair, and big, bony-knuckled hands, such as you see on women who have the gift of humanness.  She was forty-eight now—­still plain, still spare, still sallow.  Those bony, big-knuckled fingers had handed keys to potentates, and pork-packers, and millinery buyers from Seattle; and to princes incognito, and paupers much the same—­the difference being that the princes dressed down to the part, while the paupers dressed up to it.

Time, experience, understanding and the daily dealing with ever-changing humanity had brought certain lines into Sadie Corn’s face.  So skilfully were they placed that the unobservant put them down as wrinkles on the countenance of a homely, middle-aged woman; but he who read as he ran saw that the lines about the eyes were quizzical, shrewd lines, which come from the practice of gauging character at a glance; that the mouth-markings meant tolerance and sympathy and humour; that the forehead furrows had been carved there by those master chisellers, suffering and sacrifice.