Edward Henry's taxicab in that square seemed like a homeless cat that had strayed into a dog-show.
At the exact instant when the taxicab came to rest under the massive portico of Wilkins's, a chamberlain in white gloves bravely soiled the gloves by seizing the vile brass handle of its door. He bowed to Edward Henry, and assisted him to alight on to a crimson carpet. The driver of the taxi glanced with pert and candid scorn at the chamberlain, but Edward Henry looked demurely aside, and then in abstraction mounted the broad carpeted steps.
"What about poor little me?" cried the driver, who was evidently a ribald socialist, or at best a republican.
The chamberlain, pained, glanced at Edward Henry for support and direction in this crisis.
"Didn't I tell you I'd keep you?" said Edward Henry, raised now by the steps above the driver.
"Between you and me, you didn't," said the driver.
The chamberlain, with an ineffable gesture, wafted the taxicab away into some limbo appointed for waiting vehicles.
A page opened a pair of doors, and another page opened another pair of doors, each with eighteen-century ceremonies of deference, and Edward Henry stood at length in the hall of Wilkins's. The sanctuary, then, was successfully defiled, and up to the present nobody had demanded his credentials! He took breath.
In its physical aspects Wilkins's appeared to him to resemble other hotels--such as the Majestic. And so far he was not mistaken. Once Wilkins's had not resembled other hotels. For many years it had deliberately refused to recognise that even the Nineteenth Century had dawned, and its magnificent antique discomfort had been one of its main attractions to the elect. For the elect desired nothing but their own privileged society in order to be happy in a hotel. A hip bath on a blanket in the middle of the bedroom floor richly sufficed them, provided they could be guaranteed against the calamity of meeting the unelect in the corridors or at _table d'hôte_. But the rising waters of democracy--the intermixture of classes--had reacted adversely on Wilkins's. The fall of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico had given Wilkins's sad food for thought long, long ago, and the obvious general weakening of the monarchical principle had most considerably shaken it. Came the day when Wilkins's reluctantly decided that even it could not fight against the tendency of the whole world, and then, at one superb stroke, it had rebuilt and brought itself utterly up-to-date.