A few have found out this oasis in the July desert of Manhattan.
During that month you will see the hotel's reduced array of guests
scattered luxuriously about in the cool twilight of its lofty
dining-room, gazing at one another across the snowy waste of
unoccupied tables, silently congratulatory.
Superfluous, watchful, pneumatically moving waiters hover near,
supplying every want before it is expressed. The temperature
is perpetual April. The ceiling is painted in water colors to
counterfeit a summer sky across which delicate clouds drift and do
not vanish as those of nature do to our regret.
The pleasing, distant roar of Broadway is transformed in the
imagination of the happy guests to the noise of a waterfall filling
the woods with its restful sound. At every strange footstep the
guests turn an anxious ear, fearful lest their retreat be discovered
and invaded by the restless pleasure-seekers who are forever hounding
nature to her deepest lairs.
Thus in the depopulated caravansary the little band of connoisseurs
jealously hide themselves during the heated season, enjoying to the
uttermost the delights of mountain and seashore that art and skill
have gathered and served to them.
In this July came to the hotel one whose card that she sent to
the clerk for her name to be registered read "Mme. Heloise D'Arcy
Beaumont."
Madame Beaumont was a guest such as the Hotel Lotus loved. She
possessed the fine air of the elite, tempered and sweetened by a
cordial graciousness that made the hotel employees her slaves.
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