The Bird Cage

The Grand Hotel, Spurn Cove, is not what is called a hotel de luxe—that is to say, a sham palace, all glare, glitter, and jazz music, where everything costs about fifteen times what it is worth,—but it is a very good hotel, with an atmosphere of solid comfort about it, and something of a tradition in cooking. When you enter it on some blustering day after a tramp along the coast, as the swing door cuts off the last wild clutch of the wind at your tingling ears, and you pass over thick-piled carpets to the generous fire burning in the lounge, a sort of heavenly calm seems to lap you round; in the security of which, sunk deep in capacious armchairs, you will have no thought but for tea and muffins.