The halls and public rooms were chill
in anticipation and remembrance of any cold outside, but in otir parlor
there was a hole for the sort of stove which we saw in the reading-room,
twice as large as an average teakettle, with a pipe as big around as the
average rain-pipe. I am sure this apparatus would have heated us
admirably, but the weather grew milder and milder and we never had
occasion to make the successful experiment. Meanwhile the moral
atmosphere of the hotel was of a blandness which would have gone far to
content us with any meteorological perversity. When we left it we were
on those human terms with every one who ruled or served in it which one
never attains in an American hotel, and rarely in an English one.
At noon on the 4th of November the sun was really hot in our plaza; but
we were instructed that before the winter was over there would be cold
enough, not of great frosty severity, of course, but nasty and hard to
bear in the summer conditions which prevail through the year. I wish I
could tell how the people live then in their beautiful, cool houses, but
I do not know, and I do not know how they live at any season except from
the scantiest hearsay.
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