Laurel used to dread her first glimpse of the latest cheapest room her mother had engaged, trailing with a sinking heart after the scornful bellboy who guided them along endless halls and corridors, farther and farther away from the luxury of the office downstairs, to the door of the undesirable little apartment, flinging it open, it seemed to Laurel, with a gesture of disgust. But Laurel’s mother told her she ought to be thankful that such things as cheapest rooms existed. “It is only by occupying the cheapest room in the house, that you and I can go to nice hotels, where nice people go,” Mrs. Dallas explained to her daughter.

The hotels which Mrs. Dallas patronized were always elaborate affairs with expensive, port-cochèred entrances, big impressive foyers lit by enormous inverted alabaster bowls, and dining-rooms of ballroom dimensions filled with round tables, and mahogany chairs, and during the crowded dinner hour, an army of waiters with huge oval trays rushing about like darting water-bugs.

To Laurel there was something magic in the fact that it was possible under the same roof to eat and sleep in such different surroundings. She used to pretend that, like Cinderella, a wand was waved over her, too, when she emerged from the shabbiness of some cheapest rooms and approached the splendor of some ground-floors with their bright lights, bright music, long stretches of soft carpet, springy as moss, with women trailing over it on their way to the dining-room for dinner—pretty, rich-looking women with bare necks, and shoulders powdered as white as gardenias.

But their necks and shoulders weren’t any barer nor any whiter than Laurel’s mother’s, nor their cheeks any rosier, nor were they any prettier! Laurel thought that her mother was the very prettiest lady that she had ever seen in any hotel!

4

ONE MORNING LATE in August, Laurel woke up very early in the slant-ceilinged bedroom under the eaves. She knew it was early, not because the traveling-clock in its worn leather case on the bureau across the room told her so (the clock was turned so she couldn’t see its face), but because it was so still, and because she always woke early on the morning of the day set for her yearly visit to her father.

She wished she knew how early it was. A summer hotel, even the service wing, slept so late. The sun could tell Laurel nothing. The sun rose from out the ocean, and of course the cheapest room hadn’t a glimpse of the ocean.