At the exact instant, when the taxi-cab 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 taxi-cab 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.
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