the street and through vast empty rooms and up a stairway and down
a few steps and through the first squirrel-cage door Kedzie had ever
seen (she had to run round it thrice before they could get her out)
into a sumptuousness beyond her dream.

At the foot of more stairs the porter let down his burdens, and a boy
in a general's uniform seized them. The porter said, mopping his brow
to emphasize his achievement:

"This is fur's I go."

"Oh, all right! Much obliged," said Adna. He just pretended to walk
away as a joke on the porter. When he saw the man's white stare
aggravated sufficiently, Adna smiled and handed him a dime.

The porter stared and turned away in bitter grief. Then his chuckle
returned as he went his way, telling himself: "And the bes' of it
was, I fit for him! I just had to git that man."

He told the little porter about it, and when the little porter, who
had been scared away from the Thropps and left to carry Charity Coe's
dainty hand-bags, showed the big porter what he had received, still
the big porter laughed. He knew how to live, that big porter.

Kedzie followed the little general up the steps and around to
the desk. Her father realized that his fellow-passenger had been
teasing him when he referred to this place as a boarding-house, but
he was not at all crushed by the magnificence he was encountering.
He felt that he was in for it--so he cocked his toothpick pluckily
and wrote on the loose-leaf register the room clerk handed him: