Featherloom Petticoats on the road for ten years I don't see myself
trailing up and down this town looking for a place to lay my head.
I've learned this one large, immovable truth, and that is, that a
hotel clerk is a hotel clerk. It makes no difference whether he is
stuck back of a marble pillar and hidden by a gold vase full of
thirty-six-inch American Beauty roses at the Knickerbocker, or setting
the late fall fashions for men in Galesburg, Illinois."

By one small degree was the perfect poise of the peerless personage
behind the register jarred. But by only one. He was a hotel night
clerk.

"It won't do you any good to get sore, Mrs. McChesney," he began,
suavely. "Now a man would--"

"But I'm not a man," interrupted Emma McChesney. "I'm only doing a
man's work and earning a man's salary and demanding to be treated with
as much consideration as you'd show a man."

The personage busied himself mightily with a pen, and a blotter, and
sundry papers, as is the manner of personages when annoyed. "I'd like
to accommodate you; I'd like to do it."

"Cheer up," said Emma McChesney, "you're going to. I don't mind a
little discomfort. Though I want to mention in passing that if there
are any lady Bisons present you needn't bank on doubling me up with
them. I've had one experience of that kind. It was in Albia, Iowa. I'd
sleep in the kitchen range before I'd go through another."

Up went the erstwhile falling poise. "You're badly mistaken, madam.