But First We Met Our Dear
Chilians Coming To Our Hotel From The Hotel They Had Chosen, And From A
Search For Hearthstones In Others; And We Drove To The Only Hotel They
Had Left Unvisited.
There at our demand for fires the landlord all but
laughed us to scorn; he laid his hand on the cold radiator in the hotel
as if to ask what better we could wish than that.
We drove back,
humbled, to our own hotel, where the landlord met us with the Castilian
cairn he had kept at our departure. Then there was nothing for me but to
declare myself the Prodigal Son returned to take the rooms he had
offered us. We were so perfectly in his power that he could
magnanimously afford to offer us other rooms equally cold, but we did
not care to move. The Chilians had retired baffled to their own hotel,
and there was nothing for us but to accept the long evening of gelid
torpor which we foresaw must follow the effort of the soup and wine to
warm us at dinner. That night we heard through our closed doors agonized
voices which we knew to be the voices of despairing American women
wailing through the freezing corridors, "Can't she understand that I
want _boiling_ water?" and, "Can't' we go down-stairs to a fire
somewhere?" We knew the one meant the chambermaid and the other the
kitchen, but apparently neither prayer was answered.
II
As soon as we had accepted our fate, while as yet the sun had not set
behind the clouds which had kept it out of our rooms all day, we hurried
out not only to escape the rigors of our hotel, but to see as soon as we
could, as much as we could of the famous city.
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