The shops, as we drove to the hotel, seemed to expose nothing
else for sale, but poppa said that, in spite of the local consumption,
it had certainly fallen off, and, as an official representative of one
of its great rivals in the west, he naturally felt a compunctious
interest in the state of the industry. The hotel had a little courtyard,
with an orange tree in the middle and palms in pots, and we came down
the wide marble stairs, past the statues on the landing, and the
paintings on the walls, to find dinner laid on round tables out there, I
remember. A note of momma's occurs here to the effect that there is a
great deal too much fine art in Italian hotels, with a reference to the
fact that the one at Naples had the whole of Pompeii painted on the
dining room walls. She considers this practice embarrassing to the
public mind, which has no way of knowing whether to admire these things
or not, though personally we boldly decided to scorn them all. This,
however, has nothing to do with poppa and the commercial traveller. We
knew he was a commercial traveller by the way he put his toothpick in
his pocket, though poppa said afterwards that he was not exceptionally
endowed for that line of business.
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