“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 a 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.”