Work of Art by Sinclair Lewis

Like Deacon Wheelwright of the Connecticut Inn, Mr. Henry Fiesel was a vestigial remnant of the rustic tradition in hotel-keeping. He was as crafty and secretive as Wheelwright, but more boldly speculative, and considerably meaner. For years he had kept hotel in New York, but he remained a suspicious, penny-pinching, country innkeeper. He still wore rubbers and long woollen underwear. Though he was actually smooth-shaven, you remembered him as wearing sandy side-whiskers. Spiritually, he did wear sandy side-whiskers. They had merely grown inside.

He had risen from working in a lodging-house in New York to the sole proprietorship, now that he was sixty-eight, of the nine- hundred-and-fifty-room Fiesel Hotel, a respectable, cheap, yet lavishly gilded pile which made much of its income from the cut- rate drug store and the 'beauty-shop' off its large lobby, and from its bustling Gothic Coffee Shop, where business men saved time (it was never explained for what they saved it) by lunching on stuffed eggs, toast Melba, and coffee, and their stenographers in a more leisurely and elegant way trifled with a bacon-and-tomato sandwich and an ice cream soda.