whole row of books without
losing his dignity or cramping his style. Martha Foote used it for
making out reports and instruction sheets, for keeping accounts, and for
her small private correspondence.

Such was Martha Foote's room. In a modern and successful hotel, whose
foyer was rose-shaded, brass-grilled, peacock-alleyed and tessellated,
that bed-sitting-room of hers was as wholesome, and satisfying, and real
as a piece of home-made rye bread on a tray of French pastry; and as
incongruous.

It was to the orderly comfort of these accustomed surroundings that the
housekeeper of the Senate Hotel opened her eyes this Tuesday morning.
Opened them, and lay a moment, bridging the morphean chasm that lay
between last night and this morning. It was 6:30 A.M. It is bad enough
to open one's eyes at 6:30 on Monday morning. But to open them at 6:30
on Tuesday morning, after an indigo Monday.... The taste of yesterday
lingered, brackish, in Martha's mouth.

"Oh, well, it won't be as bad as yesterday, anyway. It can't." So she
assured herself, as she lay there. "There never were _two_ days like
that, hand running. Not even in the hotel business."

For yesterday had been what is known as a muddy Monday. Thick, murky,
and oozy with trouble. Two conventions, three banquets, the lobby so
full of khaki that it looked like a sand-storm, a threatened strike in
the laundry, a travelling man in two-twelve who had the grippe and
thought he was dying, a shortage of towels (that bugaboo of the hotel
housekeeper) due to the laundry trouble that had kept the linen-room
telephone jangling to the tune of a hundred damp and irate guests. And
weaving in and out, and above, and about and through it all, like a
neuralgic toothache that can't be located, persisted the constant,
nagging, maddening complaints of the Chronic Kicker in six-eighteen.

Six-eighteen was a woman. She had arrived Monday morning, early. By
Monday night every girl on the switchboard had the nervous jumps when
they plugged in at her signal. She had changed her rooms, and back
again. She had quarrelled with the room clerk. She had complained to the
office about the service, the food, the linen, the lights, the noise,
the chambermaid, all the bell-boys, and the colour of the furnishings in
her suite. She said she couldn't live with that colour. It made her
sick. Between 8:30 and 10:30 that night, there had come a lull.
Six-eighteen was doing her turn at the Majestic.

Martha