“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