"Oh no, no indeed! He ought to be fired. He gave me a room as though he were the superintendent of a free lodging-house." "But it's so hard to get trained employees that I hate to even let _him_ go. Just to show you the way things go, just when I was trying to swing a deal for a new hotel, I had to bust off negotiations and go and train a new crew of chambermaids at Sandsonville myself. You'd died laughing to seen _me_ making beds and teaching those birds to clean a spittador, beggin' your pardon, but it certainly was some show, and I do, by gum! know a traveling-man likes his bed tucked in at the foot! Oh, it's fierce! The traveling public kicks if they get bum service, and the help kick if you demand any service from 'em, and the boss gets it right in the collar-button both ways from the ace." "Well, I'm going to tell you how to have trained service and how to make your hotels distinctive. They're good hotels, as hotels go, and you really do give people good coffee and good beds and credit conveniences, as you promise, but your hotels are not distinctive. I'm going to tell you how to make them so." Una had waited till Mr. Sidney had disposed of his soup and filet mignon. She spoke deliberately, almost sternly. She reached for her new silver link bag, drew out immaculate typewritten schedules, and while he gaped she read to him precisely the faults of each of the hotels, her suggested remedies, and her general ideas of hotels, with less cuspidors, more originality, and a room where traveling-men could be at home on a rainy Sunday. "Now you know, and I know," she wound up, "that the proprietor's ideal of a hotel is one to which traveling-men will travel sixty miles on Saturday evening, in order to spend Sunday there. You take my recommendations and you'll have that kind of hotels. At the same time women will be tempted there and the local trade will go there when wife or the cook is away, or they want to give a big dinner." "It does sound like it had some possibilities," said Mr. Sidney, as she stopped for breath, after quite the most impassioned invocation of her life. She plunged in again: "Now the point of all this is that I want to be the general manager of certain departments of the Line--catering, service, decoration, and so on. I'll keep out of the financial end and we'll work out the buying together. You know it's women who make the homes for people at home, and why not the homes for people traveling?... I'm woman sales-manager for Truax & Fein--sell direct, and six women under me. I'll show you my record of sales. I've been secretary to an architect, and studied architecture a little. And plenty other jobs. Now you take these suggestions of mine to your office and study 'em over with your partner and we'll talk about the job for me by and by." She left him as quickly as she could, got back to her office, and in a shaking spasm of weeping relapsed into the old, timorous Una. § 5