When we was taken to look at rooms I remembered that there was always danger of Jone’s tendency to thankful contentment getting the better of him, and I took the matter in hand myself.  Two rooms good enough for anybody was shown us, but I was not going to take the first thing that was offered, no matter what it was.  We settled the matter by getting a first-class room, with sofas and writing-desks and everything convenient, for only a little more than we was charged for the other rooms, and the next morning we went there.

When we went back to our lodgings to pack up, and I looked in the glass and saw what a smeary, bedraggled state my hat and head was in, from being rained on, I said to Jone, “I don’t see how those people ever let such a person as me have a room at their hotel.”

“It doesn’t surprise me a bit,” said Jone; “nobody but a very high and mighty person would have dared to go lording it about that hotel with her hat feathers and flowers all plastered down over her head.  Most people can be uppish in good clothes, but to look like a scare-crow and be uppish can’t be expected except from the truly lofty.”

“I hope you are right,” I said, and I think he was.

We hadn’t been at the Babylon Hotel, where we are now, for more than two days when I said to Jone that this sort of thing wasn’t going to do.  He looked at me amazed.  “What on earth is the matter now?” he said.  “Here is a room fit for a royal duke, in a house with marble corridors and palace stairs, and gorgeous smoking-rooms, and a post-office, and a dining-room pretty nigh big enough for a hall of Congress, with waiters enough to make two military companies, and the bills of fare all in French.  If there is anything more you want, Pomona—­”

“Stop there” said I; “the last thing you mention is the rub.  It’s the dining-room; it’s in that resplendent hall that we’ve got to give ourselves a social boom or be content to fold our hands and fade away forever.”

“Which I don’t want to do yet,” said Jone, “so speak out your trouble.”

[Illustration:  “Ask the waiter what the French words mean”]

“The trouble this time is you,” said I, “and your awful meekness.  I never did see anybody anywhere as meek as you are in that dining-room.  A half-drowned fly put into the sun to dry would be overbearing and supercilious compared to you.  When you sit down at one of those tables you look as if you was afraid of hurting the chair, and when the waiter gives you the bill of fare you ask him what the French words mean, and then he looks down on you as if he was a superior Jove contemplating a hop-toad, and he tells you that this one means beef and the other means potatoes, and brings you the things that are easiest to get.  And you look as if you was thankful from the bottom of your heart that he is good enough to give you anything at all.  All the airs I put on are no good while you are so extra humble.  I tell him I don’t want this French