The rooms were just ordinary hotel rooms, furnished with the dingy, wholesale pretentiousness of hotels of the second rate.

But they were the essence of luxury compared to her one room at the Duchess's with its view of dreary back yards.
These rooms thrilled her.

They were her first material evidence that she was now actually launched upon her great adventure.
Maggie had dinner in her sitting-room with Old Jimmie and Miss Grierson--and of that dinner, mediocre and sloppy, and chilled by its transit of twelve stories from the kitchen, Miss Grierson, by way of an introductory lesson, made an august function, almost diagrammatic in its educational details.

After the dinner, with Miss Grierson's slow and formal aid, which consisted mainly in passages impressively declaimed from her private book of decorum, Maggie spent two hours in unpacking her suitcase and trunk, and repacking her scanty wardrobe in drawers of the chiffonier and dressing-table; a task which Maggie, left to herself, could have completed in ten minutes.
Maggie was still at this task in her bedroom when she heard Barney enter her sitting-room.

"He got away," she heard him say in a low voice to Old Jimmie.
She slipped quickly out of her bedroom and closed the door behind her.
An undefined something had suddenly begun to throb within her.
"Who got away, Barney ?" she demanded in a hushed tone.
Her look made Barney think rapidly.