“Will someone kindly take me out and bury me?”

That kind of speech is supposed to be very smart at his club.  And the Smiths thought it was very smart too.  Nellie and her pa beat us hollow, and then Nellie began to take her pa to task for showing off with too much screw instead of using the natural angle!

Ellis went to bed.  He was very struck by Nellie’s talents.  But he went to bed.  Probably he wanted to think things over, and consider how he could be impressive with her.  I should like to have broken it to him about his blue suit, because it was Sunday the next day, and Nellie was bound to be gorgeous for chapel and the pier, and I felt sure he’d be really glad to have that suit—­whatever he might say to me.  And I wanted him to wear it too.  But there was no chance for me to tell him.  He went off to bed like a streak of lightning.  And usually, you know, he simply will not go to bed.  Nothing will induce him to go to bed, just as nothing will induce him to get up.  I said to myself I would send the suit into his room early in the morning with a note.  I did want him to look his best.

And then of course there was the fire.  The fire was that very night.  What?...

III

Do you actually mean to sit there and tell me you never heard about the fire at Hawthornden’s Hotel last July?  Why, it was the sensation of the season.  There was over a column about it in the Manchester Guardian.  Everybody talked of it for weeks....  And no one ever told you that we were in it?  Half the annexe was burnt down.  We were in the annexe, all four of us.  I fancy the Smiths had chosen it because the rooms in the annexe are larger.  Have you ever been in a fire?...  Well, thank your stars!  We were wakened up at three o’clock.  It was getting light, even.  Somehow that made it worse.  The confusion—­you can’t imagine it.  We got out all right.  Oh! there was no special danger to life and limb.  But after all we only did get out just in time.  And with practically nothing but our dressing-gowns—­some not even that!  It’s queer, in a fire, how at first you try to save things, and keep calm, and pretend you are calm, until the thing gets hold of you.  I actually began to shovel clothes into my trunks.  Somebody said we should have time for that.  Well—­we hadn’t.  And it was a very good thing there wasn’t a lift in the annexe.  It seems a lift well acts like a chimney, and half of us might have been burnt alive.

I must say the fire-brigade was pretty good.  They got the fire out very well—­very quickly in fact.  We women, or most of us, had been bundled into private parlours and things in the main part of the hotel, which wasn’t threatened, and when we knew that the fire was out we naturally wanted to go back and see whether any of our things could be saved out of the wreck.

Oh! what a sight it was!  What a sight it was!  You’d never believe that so much damage could be done in an hour or so.  Chiefly by water, of course.  All the ground floor was swimming in water.  In fact there was a river of it running across the promenade into the sea.  About five-sixths of Llandudno, dressed nohow, was on the promenade.  However, policemen kept the people outside the gates.