place indeed!" she said stoutly. "I never heard of such a thing!"
He perceived that he had shocked her, pained her. He saw that some ingenious defence of himself was required; but he could find none. So he said, in his confusion--
"Suppose we go and have something to eat? I do want a bit of lunch, as you say, now I come to think of it. Will you?"
"What? Here?" she demanded apprehensively.
"Yes," he said. "Why not?"
"Well--!"
"Come along!" he said, with fine casualness, and conducted her to the eight swinging glass doors that led to the salle à manger of the Grand Babylon. At each pair of doors was a living statue of dignity in cloth of gold. She passed these statues without a sign of fear, but when she saw the room itself, steeped in a supra-genteel calm, full of gowns and hats and everything that you read about in the Lady's Pictorial, and the pennoned mast of a barge crossing the windows at the other end, she stopped suddenly. And one of the lord mayors of the Grand Babylon, wearing a mayoral chain, who had started out to meet them, stopped also.
"No!" she said. "I don't feel as if I could eat here. I really couldn't."
"But why?"
"Well," she said, "I couldn't fancy it somehow. Can't we go somewhere else?"
"Certainly we can," he agreed with an eagerness that was more than polite.
She thanked him with another of her comfortable, sensible smiles--a smile that took all embarrassment out of the dilemma, as balm will take irritation from a wound. And gently she removed her hat and gown, and her gestures and speech, and her comfortableness, from those august precincts. And they descended to the grill-room, which was relatively noisy, and where her roses were less conspicuous than the helmet of Navarre, and her frock found its sisters and cousins from far lands.
"I'm not much for these restaurants," she said, over grilled kidneys.
"No?" he responded tentatively. "I'm sorry. I thought the other night----"
"Oh yes," she broke in, "I was very glad to go, the other night, to that place, very glad. But, you see, I'd never been in a restaurant before."
"Really?"
"No," she said, "and I felt as if I should like to try one. And the young lady at the post office had told me that that one was a splendid one. So it is. It's beautiful. But of course they ought to be ashamed to offer you such food. Now do you remember that sole? Sole! It was no more sole than this glove's sole. And if it had been cooked a minute, it had been cooked an hour, and waiting. And then look at the prices. Oh yes, I couldn't help seeing the bill."
"I thought it was awfully cheap," said he.
"Well, I didn't!" said she. "When you think that a good housekeeper can keep everything going on ten shillings a head a week.... Why, it's simply scandalous! And I suppose this place is even dearer?"
He avoided the question. "This is a better place altogether," he said. "In fact, I don't know many places in Europe where one can eat better than one does here."
"Don't you?" she said indulgently, as if saying, "Well, I know one, at any rate."
"They say," he continued, "that there is no butter used in this place that costs less than three shillings a pound."
"No butter costs them three shillings a pound," said she.
"Not in London," said he. "They have it from Paris."
"And do you believe that?" she asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Well, I don't. Any one that pays more than one-and-nine a pound for butter, at the most, is a fool, if you'll excuse me saying the word. Not but what this is good butter. I couldn't get as good in Putney for less than eighteen pence."
She made him feel like a child who has a great deal to pick up from a kindly but firm sister.
"No, thank you," she said, a little dryly, to the waiter who proffered a further supply of chip potatoes.
"Now don't say they're cold," Priam laughed.
And she laughed also. "Shall I tell you one thing that puts me against these restaurants?" she went on. "It's the feeling you have that you don't know where the food's been. When you've got your kitchen close to your dining-room and you can keep an eye on the stuff from the moment the cart brings it, well, then, you do know a bit where you are. And you can have your dishes served hot. It stands to reason," she said. "Where is the kitchen here?"
"Somewhere down below," he replied apologetically.
"A cellar kitchen!" she exclaimed. "Why, in Putney they simply can't let houses with cellar kitchens. No! No restaurants and hotels for me--not for choice--that is, regularly."
"Still," he said, with a judicial air, "hotels are very convenient."
"Are they?" she said, meaning, "Prove it."
"For instance, here, there's a telephone in every room."
"You don't mean in the bedrooms?"
"Yes, in every bedroom."
"Well," she said, "you wouldn't catch me having a telephone in my bedroom. I should never sleep if I knew there was a telephone in the room! Fancy being forced to telephone every time you want--well! I And how is one to know who there is at the other end of the telephone? No, I don't like that. All that's all very well for gentlemen that haven't been used to what I call comfort in a way of speaking. But----"
He saw that if he persisted, nothing soon would be left of that noble pile, the Grand Babylon Hotel, save a heap of ruins. And, further, she genuinely did cause him to feel that throughout his career he had always missed the very best things of life, through being an uncherished, ingenuous, easily satisfied man. A new sensation for him! For if any male in Europe believed in his own capacity to make others make him comfortable Priam Farll was that male.
"I've never been in Putney," he ventured, on a new track.
Difficulty of Truth-telling
As she informed him, with an ungrudging particularity, about Putney, and her life at Putney, there gradually arose in his brain a vision of a kind of existence such as he had never encountered. Putney had clearly the advantages of a residential town in a magnificent situation. It lay on the slope of a hill whose foot was washed by a glorious stream entitled the Thames, its breast covered with picturesque barges and ornamental rowing boats; an arched bridge spanned this stream, and you went over the bridge in milk-white omnibuses to London. Putney had a street of handsome shops, a purely business street; no one slept there now because of the noise of motors; at eventide the street glittered in its own splendours. There were theatre, music-hall, assembly-rooms, concert hall, market, brewery, library, and an afternoon tea shop exactly like Regent Street (not that Mrs. Challice cared for their alleged China tea); also churches and chapels; and Barnes Common if you walked one way, and Wimbledon Common if you walked another. Mrs. Challice lived in Werter Road, Werter Road starting conveniently
