Now all the way up on the New Haven, Carlotta might have been adding to her limited geographical knowledge, but, with a tenacity, conscious or unconscious, she retained all her old backgrounds and attitudes. And when she took the pen from its slip of potato and signed her name on the register, she felt the reward of superior virtue. Here, in spite of unfamiliar surroundings, she was in a homelike atmosphere. For, as the yokel who combined the duties of bellboy, boot black, and bus, led her up the stairs, a score of necks turned like marionettes pulled by a common string. Here were reactions and motivatings which she could understand. They were universal. Nether limbs were as compelling in Arcadia as in Cosmopolis. Even the comments, the dozen repetitions of the standard slogan of the day,—"Oh, you kiddo," all ejaculated in a nasal staccato into which she had excited their usual drawl, testified to her usual triumph.
Perversely she didn't accommodate them with the back-kick she knew they expected. Instead, as she turned the baluster, she essayed the best exit of her idolized tragedy queen.
Her superiority, the maintenance of her standards, had been justified. Had she not always stood, loyally "from Missouri," in all disputes in plays, books, or conversations, where the higher morality of Arcady had been argued?
And now not only in matters spiritual but in those material, was her philosophy shown to be sound. Proof indeed in the bedroom's lack of plumbing, the musty bed and carpet, the cracked pitcher over whose midnight interior a spider hung suspended!
