'Will you come and join us?
By the way, where are you staying ?' Hyacinth accepted the invitation, and confessed that he had not as yet looked for any place to lay his head.
'Ah! Better go to the hotel for to-night.

It's not much of a place, but you will have to learn to put up with that sort of accommodation.
Tomorrow we'll try and find you some decent lodgings.' The hotel struck even Hyacinth as of inferior quality, though it boasted great things in the timetable advertisements, and called itself 'Imperial' in large gold letters above its door.

A smell of whisky and tobacco greeted him as he entered, and a waiter with a greasy coat, in answer to inquiries about a bed, sent him down a dark passage to seek a lady called Miss Sweeney at the bar.

Large leather cases with broad straps and waterproof-covered baskets blocked the passage, and Hyacinth stumbled among them for some time before he discovered Miss Sweeney reading a periodical called _Spicy Bits_ among her whisky-bottles.
She was a young woman of would-be fashionable appearance, and acted apparently in the double capacity of barmaid and clerk.

On hearing that Hyacinth required, not whisky, but a bedroom, she requested him to go forward to the office, indicating a glass case at the far end of the bar counter.