dily down over her
ear. Her eyes looked large and strangely luminous. "Do you know, I love
Paris!"

Ella Morrissey laid down her pencil sketch and turned slowly. She
surveyed Sophy Gold, her shrewd eyes twinkling.

"That so? What made you change your mind?"

The dreamy look in Sophy's eyes deepened.

"Why--I don't know. There's something in the atmosphere--something in
the air. It makes you do and say foolish things. It makes you feel queer
and light and happy."

Ella Morrissey's bright twinkle softened to a glow. She stared for
another brief moment. Then she trundled over to where Sophy stood and
patted her leathery cheek. "Welcome to our city!" said Miss Ella
Morrissey.

XI

THE THREE OF THEM

For eleven years Martha Foote, head housekeeper at the Senate Hotel,
Chicago, had catered, unseen, and ministered, unknown, to that great,
careless, shifting, conglomerate mass known as the Travelling Public.
Wholesale hostessing was Martha Foote's job. Senators and suffragists,
ambassadors and first families had found ease and comfort under Martha
Foote's regime. Her carpets had bent their nap to the tread of kings,
and show girls, and buyers from Montana. Her sheets had soothed the
tired limbs of presidents, and princesses, and prima donnas. For the
Senate Hotel is more than a hostelry; it is a Chicago institution. The
whole world is churned in at its revolving front door.

For eleven years Martha Foote, then, had beheld humanity throwing its
grimy suitcases on her immaculate white bedspreads; wiping its muddy
boots on her bath towels; scratching its matches on her wall paper;
scrawling its pencil marks on her cream woodwork; spilling its greasy
crumbs on her carpet; carrying away her dresser scarfs and pincushions.
There is no supremer test of character. Eleven years of hotel
housekeepership guarantees a knowledge of human nature that includes
some things no living being ought to know about her fellow men. And
inevitably one of two results must follow. You degenerate into a bitter,
waspish, and fault-finding shrew; or you develop into a patient,
tolerant, and infinitely understanding woman. Martha Foote dealt daily
with Polack scrub girls, and Irish porters, and Swedish chambermaids,
and Swiss waiters, and Halsted Street bell-boys. Italian tenors fried
onions in her Louis-Quinze suite. College boys burned cigarette holes in
her best linen sheets. Yet any one connected with the Senate Hotel, from
Pete the