HOTEL BARSTOW
255
I took in everything: the brass letter opener with its carved wood
scabbard, the matching ink-pot and pen and the dark green blotter in
a brown leather holder, the calendar which gave the date, September
7, 1925. A week from today she would leave. All winter she would
live in a house I had not seen and could not imagine, a house of which
I knew nothing except that it was on the celebrated Beacon Hill,
perhaps close by the luminous dome of the State House. My sorrow
was reinforced when I saw a stamped letter, addressed in her careful
hand to her niece, Miss Hopestill Mather, Camp Pocahontas, South–
port, Maine. For, if I could not envisage the house which stole her
away from me each autumn, I knew exactly what the little girl looked
like who lived with her. Once, the summer before, when she was ten
years old and I was nine, she had been brought by a small nervous
woman, Mrs. Brooks, her second cousin, to have luncheon at the
Hotel. She had been so self-assured, carried her head with such a
grown-up dignity that she seemed advanced in her teens. I, who that
day had been charged with filling the water glasses, stared from the
sideboard at her bright red hair, caught at the left temple by a green
ribbon and falling down her back, long and straight, over a white
batiste dress, printed with tiny yellow flowers.
As
I passed by Miss
Pride's table on my way to Mrs. Prather, I heard her say, "How
absurd, Auntie! You ought to know the counselors are
all
stupid."
And later, when I had returned to my post where, sick with envy,
of her voice and her cultured language I felt my face color and the
pulse in my forehead leap, she signaled me with her white hand
calling, "Waitress! Water, please."
I could linger no more in Miss Pride's room, but cleverly I
omitted to put clean towels on the rack beside the wash-stand in order
that I might return after my other work was done, this afternoon
when she had gone for a drive.
It was nearly luncheon time when I came into the lobby to dust
the albums on the brocade covers of the round tables, and all the old
ladies were sprily exercising the rocking chairs on the veranda, hav–
ing a chat about relatives with diabetes and friends with Bright's
Disease, and talking of their own improper pains, their bizarre sensa–
tions in the region of the gall-bladder, and their physicians who were
either "very understanding" or obscurely "unsatisfactory."
"I love cucumbers," Mrs. Prather was saying, "but they don't
love me."
Mrs. McKenzie replied, "I'm the same way with seedy things.
Thev give me heart-burn and of course they clog the colon."
· I drew back my hand with horror from the golden callosities of
