about her.  This thought persisted with her until she and her following of baggage-laden pages drew up before the desk, but it fell from her with a crash when she encountered the aloof, impersonal, world-weary regard of the presiding clerk.  In all Marjorie’s happy life she had never met anything but welcome.  The belle of a fast-growing town is rather a sheltered person, and not even the most confiding of ingenues could detect a spark of greeting in the lackadaisical regard of this highly-manicured young man.

Marjorie began her story, began to recite her lesson:  “Outside rooms, not lower than the fourth nor higher than the eighth floor; the Fifth Avenue side if possible—­and was Mrs. Robert Blake in?”

The lackadaisical young man consulted the register with a disparaging eye.

“Not staying here,” Marjorie understood him to remark.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter—­but about the rooms?”

“Front!” drawled the young man, and several blue-clad bellboys ceased from lolling on a bench and approached the desk.

“Register here,” commanded the clerk, twirling the big book on its turn-table toward Marjorie so suddenly that she jumped, and laying his pink-tinted finger on its first blank line.

“No, thank you,” she stammered, “I was not to register until my husband—­” and her heart cried out within her for that she was saying these new, dear words for the first time to so unresponsive a stranger—­“told me not to register until he should come and see that the rooms were satisfactory.  He will be here presently.”

“We have no unsatisfactory rooms,” was the answer, followed by:  “Front 625 and 6,” and fresh pages and bellboys fell upon the yellow baggage, and Marjorie, in a hot confusion of counting her property and wondering how to resent the young man’s impertinence, turned to follow them.

“One moment, madam,” the clerk murmured; “name and address, please.”  The pages were escaping with the bags, and Mrs. Blake hardly turned as she answered, according to the habit of her lifetime: 

“Underwood, West Hills, N.J.,” and flew to the elevator, which had already swallowed her baggage and the boys.  Up to suite Number 625 and 6 she was conducted by her blue-clad attendants, who opened the windows, pushed the furniture about—­then waited; who fetched ice water, drew down shades—­and waited; who closed the windows, drew up the shades, shifted the baggage from sofa to armchair, unbuckled the straps of a suitcase, indicated the telephone—­and waited; who put the bags on the bed, opened the windows, pushed the furniture back against the wall—­and waited.  Marjorie viewed all these manoeuvres with amused but unsophisticated eyes.  She smiled serenely at the smiling bellboys—­while they waited.  She thanked them prettily for their assistance—­and they waited.  She dismissed them still prettily, and it is to be regretted that, in the privacy of the hall, they swore.