“And take pictures of them,” I ventured.

“Oh, you have no idea! Pictures of themselves, holding their bears. Pictures of me, with or without the bears. Pictures of them and their bears on the street in front of the hotel, and posed in front of poor Eddie’s painting, and in their rooms, and in front of the various rooms where some of our more famous guests lived or died. What do you suppose they do with all the pictures? When can they possibly find the time to look at them?”

“Maybe there’s no film in the camera.”

“Why, Mr. Peters!” he said. “What a devious mind you have.”

He had no idea.

Bear or no bear, Room 415 didn’t look like $155 a night plus tax. The maroon carpet was threadbare, the dresser top scarred here and there by neglected cigarettes, and the one window looked out on an airshaft. And, as any member of the Friars Club would be quick to tell you, the room was so small you had to go out to the hall to change your mind.

But I hadn’t expected anything different. The Paddington was a great deal for its permanent residents, who paid less for a month in a spacious one-bedroom apartment than a transient paid for a week-long stay in a room like mine. There was, I suppose, a trade-off; the transients paid a premium to bask in the painter-writer-musician glamour of the place, and subsidized the artists who lived there year-round and provided the glamour.

I wasn’t too sure how the little chap in the floppy blue hat fit into the equation. Charming or twee, as you prefer, it made good marketing sense, giving the hotel a human (well, ursine) face while constituting a small profit center in its own right. If half the guests took bears, and if half of those decided they couldn’t part with their bears, and if the per-bear markup was a conservative fifty percent, well, it would come to enough annually to pay the light bill, or a good chunk of it, anyway. Enough, at the very least, to make the operation cost-effective.