now--what's there in it?
What's there in it? I can't even hold 'em any more. I'm through, I tell
you. I'm through!"

And waited to be disputed. Martha Foote did not disappoint her.

"There's just this in it. It's up to you to make those three women in
the third row forget what they're knitting for, even if they don't
forget their knitting. Let 'em go on knitting with their hands, but keep
their heads off it. That's your job. You're lucky to have it."

"Lucky?"

"Yes _ma'am_! You can do all the dumka stuff in private, the way Anna
Czarnik does, but it's up to you to make them laugh twice a day for
twenty minutes."

"It's all very well for you to talk that cheer-o stuff. It hasn't come
home to you, I can see that."

Martha Foote smiled. "If you don't mind my saying it, Miss McCoy, you're
too worn out from lack of sleep to see anything clearly. You don't know
me, but I do know you, you see. I know that a year ago Anna Czarnik
would have been the most interesting thing in this town, for you. You'd
have copied her clothes, and got a translation of her sob song, and made
her as real to a thousand audiences as she was to us this morning;
tragic history, patient animal face, comic shoes and all. And that's the
trouble with you, my dear. When we begin to brood about our own troubles
we lose what they call the human touch. And that's your business asset."

Geisha McCoy was looking up at her with a whimsical half-smile. "Look
here. You know too much. You're not really the hotel housekeeper, are
you?"

"I am."

"Well, then, you weren't always--"

"Yes I was. So far as I know I'm the only hotel housekeeper in history
who can't look back to the time when she had three servants of her own,
and her private carriage. I'm no decayed black-silk gentlewoman. Not me.
My father drove a hack in Sorgham, Minnesota, and my mother took in
boarders and I helped wait on table. I married when I was twenty, my man
died two years later, and I've been earning my living ever since."

"Happy?"

"I must be, because I don't stop to think about it. It's part of my job
to know everything that concerns the comfort of the guests in this
hotel."

"Including hysterics in six-eighteen?"

"Including. And that reminds me. Up on the twelfth floor of this hotel
there's a big, old-fashioned bedroom. In half an hour I can have that
room made up with the softest linen sheets, and the curtains pulled
down, and not a sound. That room's so restful it w