"Hudson Hotel," she said, sitting back against the leather tufting. CHAPTER XVI They rattled over the cobblestones until her very flesh shivered, and she bit into her tongue and her hands bounced as they lay in her lap, and, trying to peer out of the window, she bumped her head, and finally sat back, forced to be inert as she bumbled over the deep narrow streets of lower Manhattan which at night become deserted runways to slaughter, ghostly with the silent thunder of a million stampeding feet. It was ten o'clock when they finally drew up at the side entrance of the hotel in a street disappointingly narrow, but which seemed to burst, just a few feet beyond, into a wildly tossed stream of light, pedestrians, and, above all, a momentum of traffic that was like the fast toss of a mountain stream. The cab fare was overwhelmingly large. Her bags disappeared; she followed them, immediately enveloped in an atmosphere of upholstery, mosaic floors that seemed to slide from under her, palms that leaned out of corners, crystal chandeliers, uniforms, rivulets of music. She had dined upon several occasions at the Planters' Hotel in St. Louis, and had once spent a night at the Briggs House, Chicago, and the Hotel Imperial at Niagara Palls, and had objected when her father signed, "B. T. Becker, Wife and Daughter," taking the pen to write out her own name boldly under his, and upon all summer excursions had taken upon herself the ordering of the family meals. But the Hudson awed her, the very Carrara magnitude of the walls, the remote gold-leaf ceilings, light-studded, the talcy odor _de luxe_. She wanted to back out of that lobby of groups of well-dressed loungers; to turn; to run. Instead, she wrote her name on the register, marveling at her steady chirography: Luella Parlow, Dallas A narrow clerk scanned the bulk of her baggage, unhooked some keys, and called, "Front." She was mildly taken for granted and her assurance stiffened. "Bath?" "What are your rates?" "Three-fifty and up." "Yes--bath." He shifted among his keys and she noticed that when she returned the pen to him his hand lingered just too long. She had a way of lifting her eyebrows to express her archest scorn. The smile on the clerk's face did not die, but neither did it widen. She shot upward in an elevator. She padded her way through long hallways deeply carpeted to eat in footfalls. It seemed to her they must have rounded a city square of those hallways, door after door after door as imperturbable as eyeless masks, and yet which somehow seemed to look on. "Anything else, ma'am?" "Nothing." She interpreted his wait and felt for a ten-cent piece. He shifted the key to the room inside of the door and went out.