“There aren’t the people now there were a month back. They’re beginning to go now; the days are drawing in.” He said this not because there was any truth in it but because, having an engagement, presently, for a warmer part of the coast, he would have liked us all to leave, so that the hotel could be shut up and he have a few days to himself before “rejoining” in his new place. “Rejoin” and “new” were not, by the way, incompatible terms, since, for the lift-boy, “rejoin” was the usual form of the verb “to join.” The only thing that surprised me was that he condescended to say “place,” for he belonged to that modern proletariat which seeks to efface from our language every trace of the rule of domesticity. A moment later, however, he informed me that in the “situation” which he was about to “rejoin,” he would have a smarter “tunic” and a better “salary,” the words “livery” and “wages” sounding to him obsolete and unseemly. And as, by an absurd contradiction, the vocabulary has, through thick and thin, among us “masters,” survived the conception of inequality, I was always failing to understand what the lift-boy said. For instance, the only thing that interested me was to know whether my grandmother was in the hotel.