"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) by Lemony Snicket Page B

can be more and more insulting to the person being scolded. And you need chutzpah, which is a word for the sort of show-offy courage it takes to stand infront of someone and give them a good scolding, particularly if they are exhausted and sore and not in the mood to hear it.
    S. Theodora Markson had all these things, plus a flowered nightcap over her wide, unrestrained hair, and when I opened the door of the Far East Suite, she gave me a scolding I’m sure I don’t have to describe. You have doubtless been scolded about being more careful with valuable objects, or not wandering off by yourself, or causing someone to be worried sick about you, even if they appear to have taken time out from being worried sick to take a bath and change into a nightgown. Your valuable object may not have been a statue of the Bombinating Beast, and your wandering off may not have been dropping from a hawser into the trees below in the middle of a burglary, but otherwise Theodora’s scolding of me was very much like all of the many scoldings all over the world. I stood in front ofher and tried to make my face look like I was listening carefully and waited for the question that indicates a scolding is over.
    “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” she asked me.
    “What happened when you arrived at the Sallis mansion?” I asked.
    “Mrs. Sallis was not at home,” she said, “and someone had told the Officers Mitchum that we were burglars. If I’d been foolish enough to have been holding the statue, I likely would have been arrested and put on the train to prison.”
    “I saw the red light from the Mitchums’ car,” I said. “That’s why I dropped into the trees, so that we wouldn’t be caught. After the police questioned you, they found me, but with some help I managed to hide the Bombinating Beast from them and drop it into the mailbox. We should receive it by morning.”
    Theodora blinked back at me. “You promise?”
    I sighed. Every new promise was like something heavy I had to carry, with no place to put anything down. “Yes.”
    “You’re still on probation,” she said. “Get in bed. It’s late.”
    I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. It is good to brush your teeth when you are angry, because you brush harder and do a better job. I did not expect Theodora to understand what I had done, but I did expect her to be happier that I had gotten us out of trouble. But it didn’t matter who was right and who was wrong, I told myself. You’re still sharing a dreary hotel room with an unreliable chaperone, Snicket. Get some shut-eye. It’s a word which here means sleep. The sheets had spiky wrinkles, and the pillow felt like a bag of marbles, and I had a very lonely feeling, thinking of how few people knew where I was or could come to me if I were in trouble. But I was too tired to be sad about it.
    The next morning I learned why our roomwas called the Far East Suite. It was located in the corner of the Lost Arms that was the farthest east, and so the very first rays of the sunlight came through the shutters and poked me in the eye. “Go play,” I told the sunlight. “I’ll catch up with you later.” The sunlight insisted that I wake up right this very minute, so I sat up in bed and went into the bathroom to wash my face and change my clothes. Then I quietly let myself out of the Far East Suite and went down to the lobby, where Prosper Lost was standing behind the desk practicing his slippery smile. Rather than telling me that a package had arrived, he made me ask if a package had arrived, and then brought it out from underneath the desk. When I held it in my hands, my mood improved. I sat in the lobby for a few minutes to see if a woman with bad earrings would stop talking on the phone, but then gave up and decided to walk over to the library.
    Dashiell Qwerty was chasing a couple ofmoths out the front door. “Welcome,” he said to me, his voice as deep as ever. “Can I help you?”
    “Good