Page:Traveler from Altruria, Howells, 1894.djvu/256

250 the ladies in the house; on Friday night Reuben Camp brought her a hundred dollars; the head waiter had already paid in twenty-five. "I didn't dare to ask them if they speculated on them," she confided to me. "Do you suppose they would have the conscience?"

They had secured the large parlor of the hotel, where the young people danced in the evening, and where entertainments were held, of the sort usually given in summer hotels; we had already had a dramatic reading, a time with the phonograph, an exhibition of necromancy, a concert by a college glee club, and I do not know what else. The room would hold perhaps two hundred people, if they were closely seated, and by her own showing, Mrs. Makely had sold above two hundred and fifty tickets and chances. All Saturday forenoon she consoled herself with the belief that a great many people at the other hotels and cottages had bought seats merely to aid the cause, and would not really come; she estimated that at least fifty would stay away: but if Reuben Camp had sold his tickets among the natives, we might expect every one of them to come and get his money's worth; she did not dare to ask the head waiter how he had got rid of his twenty-five tickets.