When the wife leaves her hotel room in order to go rescue the cat in the rain outside, she walks past the hotel-keeper. Here, the narrator captures her reaction to the hotel-keeper, using hyperbolic language and imagery in the process:
He stood behind his desk in the far end of the dim room. The wife liked him. She liked the deadly serious way he received any complaints. She liked his dignity. She liked the way he wanted to serve her. She liked the way he felt about being a hotel-keeper. She liked his old, heavy face and big hands.
Though Hemingway’s language here is quite minimalist—as it is throughout the story—there is subtle and significant figurative language in this passage. First, the wife reflects on how she “liked the deadly serious way [the hotel-keeper] received any compliments.” This is an example of hyperbolic language, as it is unlikely the man received compliments in the same way he might receive news of someone’s death. This kind of exaggeration helps readers see the man through the wife's eyes. There is also a subtle and rare example of imagery in this passage, seen in the wife’s fondness for the hotel-keeper’s “old, heavy face and big hands.” Readers can both picture the man’s face and hands here and also, in a somewhat sideways way, feel the man’s face via Hemingway’s use of the word “heavy.”
It is notable that the wife pays such close attention to the hotel-keeper’s habits and looks. This is Hemingway’s way of showing readers how lonely the wife is and how much she longs for human connection. The hotel-keeper is alert, serious, and “want[s] to serve her,” unlike her husband George, who primarily ignores her throughout the story, choosing to hide in books rather than engage with her.
After the wife returns to the hotel room after failing to find the cat in the rain, she tells her husband George about the things that she wants, using imagery in the process:
“I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel,” she said. “I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.”
Because Hemingway’s writing style is extremely minimalist, the moments when he (or his characters) use sensory language are significant. Here, the wife describes two different sensations she wants to experience: pulling her hair back “tight and smooth” into a knot that she “can feel” and “hav[ing] a kitty to sit on [her] lap and purr when [she] stroke[s] her.”
By having the wife get specific about her desires, Hemingway encourages readers to understand the depths of the wife’s loneliness and discontent. Her husband has been seated away from her for most of the story (and likely for most of their trip and/or relationship), inspiring her to long for soft and warm physical connection from the only other source she feels is available to her: a cat.
The wife’s desire to feel a knot of long hair on her head is related to a more complex longing that Hemingway hints at throughout the story. The wife’s current short hairstyle makes her feel “like a boy,” and it’s possible that her desire to have long hair comes from a desire to fulfill certain feminine beauty expectations.
When the wife goes back up to her hotel room after failing to locate the cat she was hoping to save from the rain, she walks by the desk of the hotel-keeper (who she here refers to as the "padrone," or "boss" in Italian). In capturing the wife’s emotional experience in this moment, Hemingway uses imagery and a paradox:
As the American girl passed the office, the padrone bowed from his desk. Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance.
The imagery that Hemingway uses here—describing how “[s]omething felt very small and tight inside the girl”—is vague and evocative at the same time. Because Hemingway’s writing style is primarily focused on capturing external events, a moment like this, in which he includes a peek into a character’s inner experience, is significant. The language Hemingway uses in this surprisingly vulnerable moment helps readers relate to the woman, since they, too, having likely experienced “something [feeling] small and tight” when they are embarrassed or have failed in a given venture (as the wife has failed to find the cat).
That Hemingway’s language is vague here (the use of the word “something” is rather unclear and ambiguous) says something important about the wife—namely, that she is not all that self-aware. In other words, it might not be the narrator who is being vague, but the wife herself who cannot identify exactly what she is feeling. This proves to be true throughout the story, as she unconsciously transfers her desire for closeness with her husband onto a cat.
In addition to imagery, there is also a paradox in this passage: “The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important.” The wife’s confusion about how to feel could come from a few different sources. First, her experience with the hotel-keeper could be coming from her experience with the cat—she both pities the cat (seeing it as small and pathetic stuck out in the rain) and also sees it as very important (as it could have helped her feel less alone). Alternatively, she may just be confused about how to relate to the hotel-keeper as, just moments before, she walked by him feeling self-important and now, after failing to find the cat, she feels small and like a failure.
