do to give offense. "We receive
servants only when they accompany their employers, and then assign
them to the servants' quarters. You yourself must perceive the
necessity of this," he added hastily, seeing that Mrs. De Peyster was
shaking, "to preserve the Dauphin's social tone--"

"The servants' quarters!" gasped Mrs. De Peyster. "You mean--"

"You'll excuse me, please," interrupted the clerk, and with a bow
ended the scene and moved to the rear of the office where he plainly
busied himself over nothing at all.

Mrs. De Peyster, quivering, gulping, glared through her veil at him. A
hotel clerk had turned his back on her! And this mere clerk had dared
refuse her a room! _Refuse her!_ Because she, _she_, Mrs. De Peyster
had not the social tone!

Nothing like it had ever happened to her before.

Her desire to annihilate that clerk with the suave ambassadorial look,
and the Dauphin, and all therein and all appertaining thereunto, was
mounting toward explosion, when Matilda clutched her arm.

"It's awful, ma'am,--but let's go," she whispered. "What else can we
do?"

Yes, what else could they do? Mrs. De Peyster's wrath was still at
demolitory pressure, but she saw the sense in that question. The next
moment the two figures, duplicates of somberness, one magnificently
upright, the other shrinking, were re-passing over the muting rugs,
through the corridor of noble marble, by the lackeys between whose
common palms and the hands of patrician guests was the antiseptic
intermediary of white thread gloves.

"Perhaps it's just as well, ma'am," Matilda began tremulously as soon
as they were in the street, before Mrs. De Peyster's black storm could
burst. "How much would that suite have been?"

"Perhaps fifty dollars a day."

"I only just now thought about it--but--but please, ma'am, did you
happen to bring your purse?"

"My purse!" Mrs. De Peyster stopped short. "Matilda!"--in a voice
chilled with dismay--"I never thought of my purse until this moment!
There wasn't time! I haven't a cent!"

"And after paying for the cab, ma'am, I have only a little over
fifteen dollars."

"Matilda!"

"Perhaps, ma'am," repeated Matilda, "it was just as well they wouldn't
take us."

Mrs. De Peyster did not speak.

"And what's worse," Matilda faltered, as though the blame was hers,
"the hotels won't trust you unless you have baggage. And we have no
baggage, ma'am."

"Matilda!" There was now real tragedy in Mrs. De Peyster's v