"'Of course,' said little Sachs, his pimpled, dough-coloured face close to mine. 'Of course, if you don't care to speak to the Captain, the Chief Steward....'
"There was a trolley car station just outside the gates of the Dogana, and I halted there and said to him:
"'Look here, don't you worry to come any farther with me. You've got business to attend to, I dare say. Run right along and attend to it. Good morning.'
"I was none the better for this encounter when I finally reached the Hotel Robinson and stood in an entrance-hall that was high and dark and as cold as an ice box. I felt humiliated as well as depressed. They say people take a man at his own valuation. People don't. They average their own experience, and the answer is never very high.
"The Hotel Robinson was one of those rather shabby, half-hotel, half-pension affairs which seem to hang on year after year with any visible means of support. I say 'seem.' As a matter of fact it was a steady, prosperous establishment with a steady, prosperous connection. It never advertised, never cleaned up, nor modernized, nor did anything, as far as I could ever see, except exist and prosper. I don't know who owned it--Robinson perhaps--whether it was a company, or anything else about it. I had stayed in it once or twice, and a four-poster bed in a sort of giant crypt, with plenty of comfort so long as you didn't step on the flags in your bare feet, a quiet, well-cooked breakfast, and moderate charges were my chief memories of the establishment. _You_ would never find it if you went to Genoa. You and other tourists would be in the Bristol or the Savoy or the Miramare up on the heights above the railroad terminal. You would never find the Hotel Robinsons of Europe. They are like a mirage to the tourists, those quiet, clean, cheap hotels. You hear of them and perhaps catch a glimpse of them in the distance, and you press on, and find they have vanished. They have become dear, and noisy, and flashy, and are waiting for you at the station with a brand-new motor omnibus! Humph!
"A woman came out of a little glazed office, a woman dressed in black plush, as it seemed to me, with list slippers on her feet and a mangy old fur wrap over her arms and across the small of her back. Perhaps it was the unusual state of mind I was in; but to me she had the appearance of a discontented Sibyl, a Sibyl who had been waiting for years for somebody to make an offer for her books. Nobody, apparently, had ever come, and she had to put up with me, who only wanted Doctor West. I was just asking about him when we tumbled back into the Twentieth Century. The telephone bell rang in the office.