The Ragged Lady | Page 9

not dwelt any where
else since they ceased to live there; and she took lavishly of tickets for
all the charitable entertainments in the hotels where they stayed. Few if
any guests at hotels enjoyed so much honor from porters, bell-boys,
waiters, chambermaids and bootblacks as the Landers, for they gave
richly in fees for every conceivable service which could be rendered
them; they went out of their way to invent debts of gratitude to menials
who had done nothing for them. He would make the boy who sold
papers at the dining-room door keep the change, when he had been
charged a profit of a hundred per cent. already; and she would let no
driver who had plundered them according to the carriage tariff escape
without something for himself.
A sense of their munificence penetrated the clerks and proprietors with
a just esteem for guests who always wanted the best of everything, and
questioned no bill for extras. Mrs. Lander, in fact, who ruled these
expenditures, had no knowledge of the value of things, and made her
husband pay whatever was asked. Yet when they lived under their own
roof they had lived simply, and Lander had got his money in an
old-fashioned business way, and not in some delirious speculation such
as leaves a man reckless of money afterwards. He had been first of all a
tailor, and then he had gone into boys' and youths' clothing in a small
way, and finally he had mastered this business and come out at the top,
with his hands full. He invested his money so prosperously that the
income for two elderly people, who had no children, and only a few
outlying relations on his side, was far beyond their wants, or even their
whims.
She as a woman, who in spite of her bulk and the jellylike majesty with
which she shook in her smoothly casing brown silks, as she entered
hotel dining-rooms, and the severity with which she frowned over her
fan down the length of the hotel drawing-rooms, betrayed more than

her husband the commonness of their origin. She could not help talking,
and her accent and her diction gave her away for a middle-class New
England person of village birth and unfashionable sojourn in Boston.
He, on the contrary, lurked about the hotels where they passed their
days in a silence so dignified that when his verbs and nominatives
seemed not to agree, you accused your own hearing. He was correctly
dressed, as an elderly man should be, in the yesterday of the fashions,
and he wore with impressiveness a silk hat whenever such a hat could
be worn. A pair of drab cloth gaiters did much to identify him with an
old school of gentlemen, not very definite in time or place. He had a
full gray beard cut close, and he was in the habit of pursing his mouth a
great deal. But he meant nothing by it, and his wife meant nothing by
her frowning. They had no wish to subdue or overawe any one, or to
pass for persons of social distinction. They really did not know what
society was, and they were rather afraid of it than otherwise as they
caught sight of it in their journeys and sojourns. They led a life of
public seclusion, and dwelling forever amidst crowds, they were all in
all to each other, and nothing to the rest of the world, just as they had
been when they resided (as they would have said) on Pinckney street.
In their own house they had never entertained, though they sometimes
had company, in the style of the country town where Mrs. Lander grew
up. As soon as she was released to the grandeur of hotel life, she
expanded to the full measure of its responsibilities and privileges, but
still without seeking to make it the basis of approach to society. Among
the people who surrounded her, she had not so much acquaintance as
her husband even, who talked so little that he needed none. She
sometimes envied his ease in getting on with people when he chose;
and his boldness in speaking to fellow guests and fellow travellers, if
he really wanted anything. She wanted something of them all the time,
she wanted their conversation and their companionship; but in her
ignorance of the social arts she was thrown mainly upon the
compassion of the chambermaids. She kept these talking as long as she
could detain them in her rooms; and often fed them candy (which she
ate herself with childish greed) to bribe them to further delays. If she
was staying some days in a hotel, she sent for the house-keeper, and
made all she could of her as a listener, and as soon as she settled