see it. And I wonder, without blushing, to what miraculous degree of
perfected comfort Americans would raise all their urban traffic if only
they cared enough to keep the professional politician out of their
streets as strictly as they keep him out of their houses.

* * * * *

The great American hotel, too, is a wondrous haven for the European who
in Europe has only tasted comfort in his dreams. The calm orderliness of
the bedroom floors, the adequacy of wardrobes and lamps, the reckless
profusion of clean linen, that charming notice which one finds under
one's door in the morning, "You were called at seven-thirty, and
answered," the fundamental principle that a bedroom without a bath-room
is not a bedroom, the magic laundry which returns your effects duly
starched in eight hours, the bells which are answered immediately, the
thickness of the walls, the radiator in the elevator-shaft, the
celestial invention of the floor-clerk--I could catalogue the civilizing
features of the American hotel for pages. But the great American hotel
is a classic, and to praise it may seem inept. My one excuse for doing
so is that I have ever been a devotee of hotels, and once indeed wrote a
whole book about one. When I told the best interviewer in the United
States that my secret ambition had always been to be the manager of a
grand hotel, I was quite sincere. And whenever I saw the manager of a
great American hotel traversing with preoccupied and yet aquiline glance
his corridors and public rooms, I envied him acutely.

[Illustration: THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF ITS
SPLENDOR]

The hospitality of those corridors and public rooms is so wide and