A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies by Ellen Cooney Page B

and Everett had said, “Mabel’s mother’s name is Myrtle, I have to remember to tell her there’s a street named for her.”
    “Yes. Do you ever go into that tearoom, a genuine English one with completely imported goods, about smack in the middle?”
    “I didn’t notice a tearoom. The one here is just fine.”
    “Have you noticed anything taking place in this hotel you would call unusual?”
    “I would call it unusual to be sitting here talking to you.”
    “Have you noticed anything, in all your visits, that might compromise someone’s sense of what is decent?”
    “Had I done so, I would swear never to return.”
    “And will you?”
    “In all probability,” said Charlotte.
    He said, abruptly, “Did you think I caused the thing to come out of the wall and topple on me?”
    “I’m not going to answer that. I don’t remember what I thought.”
    “I think you do.”
    “I think, then, if you press me, I could never have thought so for one reason. I would never be able to bear it if you had looked at yourself as something you would choose to destroy. I don’t think you would have intended to have bones broken and survive it. I don’t think I wanted to know how much hopelessness you must have felt.”
    “I told you of it often.”
    “But we would go riding, and that made it seem all right.”
    “Thank you, Charlotte.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    The interview was over. He gave a glance out the window once more, but this time it was to prepare himself to go out into the storm. “There’ll be no roads cleared, and I expect to be pushing myself through drifts to my knees.”
    “Goodbye, Dickie. Maybe all the criminals will stay inside today.”
    “That might make it worse. I had my coat with me, and my boots, when I came in here, but the maid came to take them. I would like to find the coatroom. Where might that be?”
    Charlotte didn’t know. How should she know that? “The coatroom? Dickie, there are servants. How would I know, when there are servants? Tell the man in the hall you want your coat and he’ll get it.”
    “I suppose you’re correct,” he said. Then he said, “I believe you don’t realize how much I trust your opinion.”
    “You’re paid to have suspicions.”
    “But one knows.”
    “And how do you? Because we were friends from before?”
    “Because, Charlotte, I live in Dorchester Heights, near the sanatorium. I married one of my nurses. We could never afford this neighborhood. I sometimes spend the night at the station when it’s too hard to make it home. There is no such place as Lilac Street,” he said simply, and stood up, pocketing the card of the Vice Society.
    “Dickie!” She jumped up, nearly knocking over her chair. “You
tested
me?”
    “It’s all right. You passed.”

C harlotte holed up in her room—Aunt Lily’s room—and stayed put for four days.
    Harry Alcorn knocked on her door now and then. Did she want some company? Was she looking out the window at the hell-forsaken snow? Did she know the city was as stopped as a clock? Did she mind the blandness of the tedious meals, from what they had in the larder, just squash, potatoes, turnips, celery, applesauce, and cakes with no eggs? Would she like to come downstairs for a card game with other guests, would she like to listen to the gramophone, would she like to hear some piano? They had a very good pianist, as it happened, a New York lady who had played three times in concert on Washington Street, was married to a cellist with the Boston Symphony, and was a whiz at those sublime German sonatas, plus the new modern rowdy stuff.
    She answered, to everything, “I wish not to speak to you, Mr. Alcorn, or to anyone else.”
    She hadn’t been out of her room except to bathe once, in the lavatory down the hall. Every floor had its own, with expensive new ceramic bathtubs fixed with shower heads, which distributed water from a bucket that was nearly as large as the tub.
    The showers were not in use this week.