So she, as well as the minor hotel employes, knew six-eighteen as Geisha McCoy.  Geisha McCoy, who got a thousand a week for singing a few songs and chatting informally with the delighted hundreds on the other side of the footlights.  Geisha McCoy made nothing of those same footlights.  She reached out, so to speak, and shook hands with you across their amber glare.  Neither lovely nor alluring, this woman.  And as for her voice!—­And yet for ten years or more this rather plain person, somewhat dumpy, no longer young, had been singing her every-day, human songs about every-day, human people.  And invariably (and figuratively) her audience clambered up over the footlights, and sat in her lap.  She had never resorted to cheap music-hall tricks.  She had never invited the gallery to join in the chorus.  She descended to no finger-snapping.  But when she sang a song about a waitress she was a waitress.  She never hesitated to twist up her hair, and pull down her mouth, to get an effect.  She didn’t seem to be thinking about herself, at all, or about her clothes, or her method, or her effort, or anything but the audience that was plastic to her deft and magic manipulation.

Until very recently.  Six months had wrought a subtle change in Geisha McCoy.  She still sang her every-day, human songs about every-day, human people.  But you failed, somehow, to recognise them as such.  They sounded sawdust-stuffed.  And you were likely to hear the man behind you say, “Yeh, but you ought to have heard her five years ago.  She’s about through.”

Such was six-eighteen.  Martha Foote, luxuriating in that one delicious moment between her 6:30 awakening, and her 6:31 arising, mused on these things.  She thought of how, at eleven o’clock the night before, her telephone had rung with the sharp zing! of trouble.  The voice of Irish Nellie, on night duty on the sixth floor, had sounded thick-brogued, sure sign of distress with her.

“I’m sorry to be a-botherin’ ye, Mis’ Phut.  It’s Nellie speakin’—­Irish Nellie on the sixt’.”

“What’s the trouble, Nellie?”

“It’s that six-eighteen again.  She’s goin’ on like mad.  She’s carryin’ on something fierce.”

“What about?”

“Th’—­th’ blankets, Mis’ Phut.”

“Blankets?—­”

“She says—­it’s her wurruds, not mine—­she says they’re vile.  Vile, she says.”

Martha Foote’s spine had stiffened.  “In this house!  Vile!”

If there was one thing more than another upon which Martha Foote prided herself it was the Senate Hotel bed coverings.  Creamy, spotless, downy, they were her especial fad.  “Brocade chairs, and pink lamps, and gold snake-work are all well and good,” she was wont to say, “and so are American Beauties in the lobby and white gloves on the elevator boys.  But it’s the blankets on the beds that stamp a hotel first or second class.”  And now this, from Nellie.

“I know how ye feel, an’ all.  I sez to ’er, I sez:  ’There never was a blanket in this house,’ I sez, ’that didn’t look as if it cud be sarved up wit’ whipped cr-ream,’ I sez, ‘an’ et,’ I sez to her; ‘an’ fu’thermore,’ I sez—­”