Jimmy began to wish that somebody would stop this girl.  Why couldn’t the little man change the subject to the weather, or that stout child start prattling about some general topic?  Surely a boy of that age, newly arrived in London, must have all sorts of things to prattle about?  But the little man was dealing strenuously with a breaded cutlet, while the stout boy, grimly silent, surrounded fish-pie in the forthright manner of a starving python.  As for the elder woman, she seemed to be wrestling with unpleasant thoughts, beyond speech.

“—­I always think that Jimmy Crocker is the worst case I know of the kind of American young man who spends all his time in Europe and tries to become an imitation Englishman.  Most of them are the sort any country would be glad to get rid of, but he used to work once, so you can’t excuse him on the ground that he hasn’t the sense to know what he’s doing.  He’s deliberately chosen to loaf about London and make a pest of himself.  He went to pieces with his eyes open.  He’s a perfect, utter, hopeless WORM!”

Jimmy had never been very fond of the orchestra at the Regent Grill, holding the view that it interfered with conversation and made for an unhygienic rapidity of mastication; but he was profoundly grateful to it now for bursting suddenly into La Boheme, the loudest item in its repertory.  Under cover of that protective din he was able to toy with a steaming dish which his waiter had brought.  Probably that girl was saying all sorts of things about him still but he could not hear them.

The music died away.  For a moment the tortured air quivered in comparative silence; then the girl’s voice spoke again.  She had, however, selected another topic of conversation.

“I’ve seen all I want to of England,” she said, “I’ve seen Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament and His Majesty’s Theatre and the Savoy and the Cheshire Cheese, and I’ve developed a frightful home-sickness.  Why shouldn’t we go back to-morrow?”

For the first time in the proceedings the elder woman spoke.  She cast aside her mantle of gloom long enough to say “Yes,” then wrapped it round her again.  The little man, who had apparently been waiting for her vote before giving his own, said that the sooner he was on board a New York-bound boat the better he would be pleased.  The stout boy said nothing.  He had finished his fish-pie, and was now attacking jam roll with a sort of morose resolution.

“There’s certain to be a boat,” said the girl.  “There always is.  You’ve got to say that for England—­it’s an easy place to get back to America from.”  She paused.  “What I can’t understand is how, after having been in America and knowing what it was like, Jimmy Crocker could stand living . . .”

The waiter had come to Jimmy’s side, bearing cheese; but Jimmy looked at it with dislike and shook his head in silent negation.  He was about to depart from this place.  His capacity for absorbing home-truths about himself was exhausted.  He placed a noiseless sovereign on the table, caught the waiter’s eye, registered renunciation, and departed soft-footed down the aisle.  The waiter, a man who had never been able to bring himself to believe in miracles, revised the views of a life-time.  He looked at the sovereign, then at Jimmy, then at the sovereign again.  Then he took up the coin and bit it furtively.