It was being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes with his leg across the corner of a table.

Next door was the kitchen, where they were washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into cauldrons, while the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken meats, sopping up the gravy with bits of crumb.

Moving on, they became lost in a plantation of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves outside the drawing-room, where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined well, lay back in deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning over the pages of magazines.

A thin woman was flourishing up and down the piano.
"What is a dahabeeyah, Charles ?" the distinct voice of a widow, seated in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.
It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the general clearing of throats and tapping of knees.
"They're all old in this room," Rachel whispered.
Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two men in shirt-sleeves playing billiards with two young ladies.
"He pinched my arm!" the plump young woman cried, as she missed her stroke.
"Now you two--no ragging," the young man with the red face reproved them, who was marking.
"Take care or we shall be seen," whispered Helen, plucking Rachel by the arm.

Incautiously her head had risen to the middle of the window.
Turning the corner they came to the largest room in the hotel, which was supplied with four windows, and was called the Lounge, although it was really a hall.