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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 whole row of books without losing his dignity or cramping his style.  Martha Foote used it for making out reports and instruction sheets, for keeping accounts, and for her small private correspondence.

Such was Martha Foote’s room.  In a modern and successful hotel, whose foyer was rose-shaded, brass-grilled, peacock-alleyed and tessellated, that bed-sitting-room of hers was as wholesome, and satisfying, and real as a piece of home-made rye bread on a tray of French pastry; and as incongruous.

It was to the orderly comfort of these accustomed surroundings that the housekeeper of the Senate Hotel opened her eyes this Tuesday morning.  Opened them, and lay a moment, bridging the morphean chasm that lay between last night and this morning.  It was 6:30 A.M.  It is bad enough to open one’s eyes at 6:30 on Monday morning.  But to open them at 6:30 on Tuesday morning, after an indigo Monday....  The taste of yesterday lingered, brackish, in Martha’s mouth.