Foote knew that. She knew, too, that her name was Geisha McCoy,
and she knew what that name meant, just as you do. She had even laughed
and quickened and responded to Geisha McCoy's manipulation of her
audience, just as you have. Martha Foote knew the value of the personal
note, and it had been her idea that had resulted in the rule which
obliged elevator boys, chambermaids, floor clerks, doormen and waiters
if possible, to learn the names of Senate Hotel guests, no matter how
brief their stay.

"They like it," she had said, to Manager Brant. "You know that better
than I do. They'll be flattered, and surprised, and tickled to death,
and they'll go back to Burlington, Iowa, and tell how well known they
are at the Senate."

When the suggestion was met with the argument that no human being could
be expected to perform such daily feats of memory Martha Foote battered
it down with:

"That's just where you're mistaken. The first few days are bad. After
that it's easier every day, until it becomes mechanical. I remember when
I first started waiting on table in my mother's quick lunch eating house
in Sorghum, Minnesota. I'd bring 'em wheat cakes when they'd ordered
pork and beans, but it wasn't two weeks before I could take six orders,
from soup to pie, without so much as forgetting the catsup. Habit,
that's all."

So she, as well as the minor hotel employes, knew six-eighteen as Geisha
McCoy. Geisha McCoy, who got a thousand a week for singing a few songs
and chatting informally with the delighted hundreds on the other side of
the footlights. Geisha McCoy made nothing of those same footlights. She
reached out, so to speak, and shook hands with you across their amber
glare. Neither lovely nor alluring, this woman. And as for her
voice!--And yet for ten years or more this rather plain person, somewhat
dumpy, no longer young, had been singing her every-day, human songs
about every-day, human people. And invariably (and figuratively) her
audience clambered up over the footlights, and sat in her lap. She had
never resorted to cheap music-hall tricks. She had never invited the
gallery to join in the chorus. She descended to no finger-snapping. But
when she sang a song about a waitress she was a waitress. She never
hesitated to twist up her hair, and pull down her mouth, to get an
effect. She didn't seem to be thinking about herself, at all, or about
her clothes, or her method, or her effort, or anything but the audience
that w