In due course of time the Medcrofts and Miss Fowler were presented to the distinguished couple.  This function was necessarily delayed until Odell-Carney had time to go into the details of a particularly annoying episode of the afternoon.  He was telling the story to his friend Rodney, and of course everything was at a standstill until he got through.

It seems that Mr. Odell-Carney felt the need of a nap at three o’clock.  He gave strict injunctions that there was to be no noise in the halls while he slept, and then went into his room and stretched out.  Anyone who has stopped at the Hotel Four Seasons will have no difficulty in recalling the electric hall-bells which serve to attract the chambermaids to given spots.  If one needs the chambermaid, he presses the button in his room and a little bell in the hall tinkles furiously until she responds and shuts it off.  In that way one is sure that she has heard and is coming, a most admirable bit of German ingenuity.  If she happens to be taking her lunch at the time, the bell goes on ringing until she returns; it is a faithful bell.  Coming back to Odell-Carney:  the maid on his floor was making up a room in close proximity when a most annoying thing happened to her.  A porter who had reason to dislike her came along and turned her key from the outside, locking her in the room.  She couldn’t get out, and she had been warned against making a sound that might disturb the English guest.  With rare intelligence, she did not scream or make an outcry, but wisely proceeded to press the button for a chambermaid.  Then she evidently sat down to wait.  To make the story short, she rang her own call-bell for two hours, no other maid condescending to notice the call, which speaks volumes for the almost martial system of the hotel.  The bell was opposite the narrator’s door.  Is it, therefore, surprising that he required a great deal of time to tell all that he felt?  It was not so much of what he did that he spoke at such great length, but of what he felt.

“’Pon me soul,” he exploded in the end, twisting his mustache with nervous energy, “it was the demdest nap I ever had.  I didn’t close my eyes, c’nfend me if I did.”

While Odell-Carney was studiously adjusting his eyeglass for a final glare at an unoffending ’bus boy who almost dropped his tray of plates in consequence, Mr. Rodney fussily intervened and introduced the Medcrofts.  Mrs. Odell-Carney was delightfully gracious; she was sure that no nicer party could have been “got together.”  Her husband may have been excessively slow in most things, but he was quick to recognise and appreciate feminine beauty of face and figure.  He unbent at once in the presence of the unmistakably handsome Fowler sisters; his expressive “chawmed” was in direct contrast to his ordinary manner of acknowledging an introduction.

“Mr. Medcroft is the famous architect, you know,” explained the anxious Mrs. Rodney.

“Oh, yes, I know,” drawled Mr. Odell-Carney.  “You American architects are doing great things, ’pon my soul,” he added luminously.  Brock stuck his eyeglass in tighter and hemmed with raucous precision.  Mrs. Medcroft stiffened perceptibly.