The great American hotel, too, is a wondrous haven for the European who in Europe has only tasted comfort in his dreams.  The calm orderliness of the bedroom floors, the adequacy of wardrobes and lamps, the reckless profusion of clean linen, that charming notice which one finds under one’s door in the morning, “You were called at seven-thirty, and answered,” the fundamental principle that a bedroom without a bath-room is not a bedroom, the magic laundry which returns your effects duly starched in eight hours, the bells which are answered immediately, the thickness of the walls, the radiator in the elevator-shaft, the celestial invention of the floor-clerk—­I could catalogue the civilizing features of the American hotel for pages.  But the great American hotel is a classic, and to praise it may seem inept.  My one excuse for doing so is that I have ever been a devotee of hotels, and once indeed wrote a whole book about one.  When I told the best interviewer in the United States that my secret ambition had always been to be the manager of a grand hotel, I was quite sincere.  And whenever I saw the manager of a great American hotel traversing with preoccupied and yet aquiline glance his corridors and public rooms, I envied him acutely.

[Illustration:  THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF ITS SPLENDOR]

The hospitality of those corridors and public rooms is so wide and comprehensive that the ground floor and mezzanine of a really big hotel in the United States offer a spectacle of humanity such as cannot be seen in Europe; they offer also a remarkable contrast to the tranquillity of their own upper stories, where any eccentricity is vigorously discouraged.  I think that it must be the vast tumult and promiscuity of the ground floor which is responsible for the relative inferiority of the restaurant in a great American hotel.  A restaurant should be a paramount unit, but as a fact in these hotels it is no more than an item in a series of resorts, several of which equal if they do not surpass it in popular interest.  The Americans, I found, would show more interest in the barber-shop than in the restaurant. (And to see the American man of business, theoretically in a hurry, having his head bumped about by a hair-cutter, his right hand tended by one manicurist, his left hand tended by another manicurist, his boots polished by a lightning shiner, and his wits polished by the two manicurists together—­the whole simultaneously—­this spectacle in itself was possibly a reflection on the American’s sense of proportion.) Further, a restaurant should be a sacred retreat, screened away from the world; which ideal is foreign to the very spirit of the great American hotel.