Miss Pride was looking at my feet, shod in a pair of white moccasins which my father had made. I was ashamed that they were so dirty and that my socks were ragged. She turned at the announcement of luncheon, but I did not fail to hear her say to Mr. Brock as they crossed the lobby, “I gather that he knows his business and has little of it.”

•

After Audrey, the headwaitress, and I had set the tables for dinner, I went upstairs with Miss Pride’s fresh towels. The corridor was quiet, for all the guests were napping. I could hear, through the wall by Miss Pride’s bed, the faint popping of air in Mrs. McKenzie’s nose as she slept deeply. Immediately I took my post at the windows and in about a quarter of an hour, I saw Miss Pride go down the wooden stairs of the porch, pinching the hand-rail with her gloved fingers. Then she waited on the lawn for her high, black limousine. Once I had seen in it vases for flowers on the sides, hanging like pictures in a house. I believed she had other decorative furnishings in the back seat as, perhaps, a needlepoint footstool and a writing board. What if she even had a tea table and at a suitable hour and place, ordered the car to be stopped and then served herself tea! I would dwell on this enchanting thought sometimes as long as half an hour, seeing with an overwhelming happiness the actual seeds of the strawberry jam.

Here came the car! Slipping round the corner of the Hotel, its long black snout caught the rays of the sun which shot fitfully into my eyes. It stopped and Mac, the chauffeur, stepped out. He was a thin, sharp, silvery young man who, in his gray livery, looked like an upright rat. He suffered from some strange distemper that caused his feet to swell, but though the valetudinarians of the veranda perpetually foretold Miss Pride’s doom when the man while driving should die at the wheel (for they were enough acquainted with his symptoms to know that foot swelling indicated a rheumatic heart for which there was no cure), she kept him on and about twice a week was handed into the car by his lean, gray paws which, since they went out and withdrew so quickly, seemed to abhor their contact with the desiccated elbow that they briefly cupped.

“Well, Mac,” came her voice, “I trust we are all in order. I must run in to Pinckney Street today.”