Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Hotels -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Love stories; Siblings -- Fiction
As The Camp was to be turned into an inn which should serve its guests
with delicious food, Phyllis and her garden became of immense importance
and she began to sit much apart, marking seed catalogues with one end of
a pencil and drumming on her beautiful teeth with the other.
Negotiations had been undertaken with a number of periodicals devoted to
outdoor life, and a hundred schemes for advertising had been boiled down
to one, which even Arthur was willing to let stand. To embody Mary's
ideas of a profitable proposition into a page of advertising without
being too absurd or too "cheap," had proved extremely difficult.
"We will run The Inn," she said, "so that rich people will live very
much as they would if they were doing the running. One big price must
cover all the luxuries of home. We must eliminate all extras--everything
which is a nuisance or a trouble. Except for the trifling fact that we
receive pay for it, we must treat them exactly as papa used to treat his
guests. He gave his guests splendid food of his own ordering. When they
wanted cigars or cigarettes, they helped themselves. There was always
champagne for dinner, but if men preferred whiskey and soda, they told
the butler, and he saw that they got it. What I'm driving at is this:
There must be no difference in price for a guest who drinks champagne
and one who doesn't drink anything. And more important still, we must do
all the laundering without extra charge; guides, guide boats, guns, and
fishing-tackle must be on tap--just as papa had everything for his
guests. The one big price must include absolutely everything."
Added to this general idea, it was further conveyed in the final
advertisement that the shooting was over hundreds of thousands of acres
and the fishing in countless lakes and streams. And the last line of
the ad, as had been previously agreed, was this:
"PRICES RATHER HIGH."
And, as Gay said to Lee: "If that doesn't fetch 'em--you and I know
something that maybe will."
The full-page ad began and ended with a portrait of Uncas, the chipmunk,
front view, sitting up, his cheeks puffed to the bursting point. The
centre of the page was occupied by a rather large view of The Camp and
many of the charming little buildings which composed it, taken from the
lake. Throughout the text were scattered reproductions--strings of
trout, a black bear, nine deer hanging in a row, and other seductions to
an out-of-door life. For lovers of good food there was a tiny portrait
of the chef and adjoining it a photograph of the largest bunch of white
muscats that had ever matured in Phyllis's vinery.
A few days before the final proofs began to come in from the advertising
managers, there arrived, addressed to Gay, a package from a firm in New
York which makes a specialty of developing and printing photographs for
amateurs. Gay concealed the package, but Lee had noted its existence,
and sighed with relief. A little later she found occasion to take Gay
aside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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