If you
have learned the ropes you order your room waiter to fetch your
bill to you, and in the privacy of your apartment you pore over
the formidable document wherein every small charge is fully specified,
the whole concluding with an impressive array of items regarding
which you have no prior recollection whatsoever. Considering the
total, you put aside an additional ten per cent, calculated for
division on the basis of so much for the waiter, so much for the
boots, so much for the maid and the porter, and the cashier, and
the rest of them. It is not necessary that you send for these
persons in order to confer your farewell remembrances on them;
they will be waiting for you in the hallways. No matter how early
or late the hour of your leaving may be, you find them there in a
long and serried rank.
You distribute bills and coins until your ten per cent is exhausted,
and then you are pained to note that several servitors yet remain,
lined up and all expectant, owners of strange faces that you do
not recall ever having seen before, but who are now at hand with
claims, real or imaginary, on your purse. Inasmuch as you have a
deadly fear of being remembered afterward in this hotel as a piker,
you continue to dip down and to fork over, and so by the time you
reach the tail end of the procession your ten per cent has grown
to twelve or fifteen per cent, or even more.
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