The manager had seen to it that the party of young men, being very obviously rich, at any rate for this night, had some of the best attendance in the restaurant.  Several waiters had been told off specially to look after them, the least and busiest of whom was little more than a boy—­a slender pale boy, who was working very hard to give satisfaction.  The cynic might think—­and say, for cynics always say what they think—­that this zeal was the result of his youth; but the cynic for once would be only partly right.  The zeal also had sartorial springs, this eventful day being the first on which the boy had been promoted to full waiter-hood, and the first therefore on which he had ever worn a suit of evening dress; which by dint of hard saving his family had been able to obtain for him.  Wearing a uniform of such dignity and conscious that he was on the threshold of his career, he was trying very hard to make good and hoping very fervently that he would get through without any drops or splashes to impair the freshness of his new and wonderful attire.

The party of young men, who had been at a very illustrious English school together and now were either at a university or in the world, were celebrating an annual event and were very merry about it.  For the most part they had, between the past and the present, as many topics of conversation as were needed, but now and then came a lull, during which some of them would look around at the other tables, note the prettier of the girls or the odder of the men and comment upon them; and it chanced that in such a pause one of the diners happened for the first time to notice with any attention the assiduous young waiter.  Although not old enough to have given any thought to the anomaly of youth (though lowly) attending upon youth (though gilded) at its meals in this way—­not old enough indeed to have pondered at all upon the relations of Capital and Labour or of the domineering and the servile—­he had reflected a good deal upon the cut and fit of clothes, and there was something about the waiting-boy’s evening coat that outraged his critical sense.  Nor did the fact that the other’s indifferent tailoring throw the perfection of his own into such brilliant contrast—­the similarity between the livery of service and the male costume de luxe fostering such comparisons—­make him any more lenient.

“Did you ever see,” he asked his neighbour, “such a coat-collar as that waiting Johnnie’s?  I ask you.  How can anyone, even a waiter, wear a thing like that?  Don’t they ever see themselves in the glass, or if they do can’t they see straight?  Why, it covers his collar altogether.”

His companion agreed.  “And the shoulders!  You’d have thought that in a restaurant like this the management would be more particular.  By George, that’s a jolly pretty girl coming in!  Look—­over there, just under the clock, with the red hair.”  And the waiter was forgotten.  Only, however, by his table critics, for at that moment a little woman who had made friends with the hall-porter for this express purpose was peering through the window of the entrance, searching the room for her son.  She had never yet seen him at his work at all, and certainly not in his grand waiting clothes, and naturally she wanted to.