“Voulez-vous me dire l’heure, s’il vous plait, M’sieu’ l’ soldat?”

Claude looked down into his admiring eyes with a feeling of panic.  He wouldn’t mind being dumb to a man, or even to a pretty girl, but this was terrible.  His tongue went dry, and his face grew scarlet.  The child’s expectant gaze changed to a look of doubt, and then of fear.  He had spoken before to Americans who didn’t understand, but they had not turned red and looked angry like this one; this soldier must be ill, or wrong in his head.  The boy turned and ran away.

Many a serious mishap had distressed Claude less.  He was disappointed, too.  There was something friendly in the boy’s face that he wanted... that he needed.  As he rose he ground his heel into the gravel.  “Unless I can learn to talk to the children of this country,” he muttered, “I’ll go home!”

II

Claude set off to find the Grand Hotel, where he had promised to dine with Victor Morse.  The porter there spoke English.  He called a red-headed boy in a dirty uniform and told him to take the American to vingt-quatre.  The boy also spoke English.  “Plenty money in New York, I guess!  In France, no money.”  He made their way, through musty corridors and up slippery staircases, as long as possible, shrewdly eyeing the visitor and rubbing his thumb nervously against his fingers all the while.

“Vingt-quatre, twen’y-four,” he announced, rapping at a door with one hand and suggestively opening the other.  Claude put something into it—­anything to be rid of him.

Victor was standing before the fireplace.  “Hello, Wheeler, come in.  Our dinner will be served up here.  It’s big enough, isn’t it?  I could get nothing between a coop, and this at fifteen dollars a day.”

The room was spacious enough for a banquet; with two huge beds, and great windows that swung in on hinges, like doors, and that had certainly not been washed since before the war.  The heavy red cotton-brocade hangings and lace curtains were stiff with dust, the thick carpet was strewn with cigarette-ends and matches.  Razor blades and “Khaki Comfort” boxes lay about on the dresser, and former occupants had left their autographs in the dust on the table.  Officers slept there, and went away, and other officers arrived,—­and the room remained the same, like a wood in which travellers camp for the night.  The valet de chambre carried away only what he could use; discarded shirts and socks and old shoes.  It seemed a rather dismal place to have a party.

When the waiter came, he dusted off the table with his apron and put on a clean cloth, napkins, and glasses.  Victor and his guest sat down under an electric light bulb with a broken shade, around which a silent halo of flies moved unceasingly.  They did not buzz, or dart aloft, or descend to try the soup, but hung there in the center of the room as if they were a part of the lighting system.  The constant attendance of the waiter embarrassed Claude; he felt as if he were being watched.