The book begins: There are many interesting hotels scattered about the world, with a few of which I am acquainted and with a great many of which I am not. Of course all hotels are interesting, from one point of view or another. In fact the surest way to fix an audience's attention is to introduce your hero, or to display your opening chorus in the lobby or along the facade of a hotel. The life, the movement and color, the shifting individualities, the pretense, the bluff, the self-consciousness, the independence, the ennui, the darting or lounging servants, the very fact that of those before your eyes seven out of ten are drawn from distant and scattered places, are sufficient in themselves to invest the smallest hostelry with glamour.