“Oh yes.  And Italiantown.  I used to wander round there.”

“Well, down at the Seven Flowery Kingdoms Chop Suey and American Cooking there’s tea at five dollars a cup that they advertise is grown on `cloud-covered mountain-tops.’  I suppose when the tops aren’t cloud-covered they only charge three dollars a cup....  But, serious-like, there’s really only two kinds of teas—­those you go to to meet the man you love and ought to hate, and those you give to spite the women you hate but ought to—­hate!  Isn’t that lovely and complicated?  That’s playing.  With words.  My aged parent calls it `talking too much and not saying anything.’  Note that last—­not saying anything! It’s one of the rules in playing that mustn’t be broken.”

He understood that better than most of the things she said.  “Why,” he exclaimed, “it’s kind of talking sideways.”

“Why, yes.  Of course.  Talking sideways.  Don’t you see now?”

Gallant gentleman as he was, he let her think she had invented the phrase.

She said many other things; things implying such vast learning that he made gigantic resolves to “read like thunder.”

Her great lesson was the art of taking tea.  He found, surprisedly, that they weren’t really going to endanger their clothes by rolling on park grass.  Instead, she led him to a tea-room behind a candy-shop on Tottenham Court Road, a low room with white wicker chairs, colored tiles set in the wall, and green Sedji-ware jugs with irregular bunches of white roses.  A waitress with wild-rose cheeks and a busy step brought Orange Pekoe and lemon for her, Ceylon and Russian Caravan tea and a jug of clotted cream for him, with a pile of cinnamon buns.

“But—­” said Istra.  “Isn’t this like Alice in Wonderland!  But you must learn the buttering of English muffins most of all.  If you get to be very good at it the flunkies will let you take tea at the Carleton.  They are such hypercritical flunkies, and the one that brings the gold butter-measuring rod to test your skill, why, he always wears knee-breeches of silver gray.  So you can see, Billy, how careful you have to be.  And eat them without buttering your nose.  For if you butter your nose they’ll think you’re a Greek professor.  And you wouldn’t like that, would you, honey?” He learned how to pat the butter into the comfortable brown insides of the muffins that looked so cold and floury without.  But Istra seemed to have lost interest; and he didn’t in the least follow her when she observed: 

“Doubtless it was the best butter.  But where, where, dear dormouse, are the hatter and hare?  Especially the sweet bunny rabbit that wriggled his ears and loved Gralice, the princesse d’ outre-mer.

               “Where, where are the hatter and hare,
               And where is the best butter gone?”

Presently:  “Come on.  Let’s beat it down to Soho for dinner.  Or—­no!  Now you shall lead me.  Show me where you’d go for dinner.  And you shall take me to a music-hall, and make me enjoy it.  Now you teach me to play.”