ppeared; every man relented and stopped at some table or
other. But the figure I desired remained invisible, and my ice
continued to melt, in accordance with chemical law. The orchestra in the
gallery leaped suddenly into the rag-time without whose accompaniment it
was impossible, anywhere in the civilized world, to dine correctly. That
rag-time, committed, I suppose, originally by some well-intentioned if
banal composer in the privacy of his study one night, had spread over
the whole universe of restaurants like a pest, to the exasperation of
the sensitive, but evidently to the joy of correct diners. Joy shone in
the elated eyes of the four hundred persons correctly dining together in
this high refectory, and at the end there was honest applause!... And
yet you never encountered a person who, questioned singly, did not agree
and even assert of his own accord that music at meals is an outrageous
nuisance!...

However, my desired figure was at length manifest. The man came hurrying
and a little breathless, with his salver, at once apologetic and
triumphant. My ice was half liquid. Had I not the right to reproach him,
in the withering, contemptuous tone which correct diners have learned to
adopt toward the alien serfs who attend them? I had not. I had neither
the right nor the courage nor the wish. This man was as Anglo-Saxon as
myself. He had, with all his deference, the mien of the race. When he
dreamed of paradise, he probably did not dream of the _caisse_ of a
cosmopolitan Grand Hotel in Switzerland. When he spoke English he was
not speaking a foreign language. And this restaurant was one of the
extremely few fashionable Anglo-Saxon restaurants left in the world,
where an order given in English is understood at the first try, and
where the English language is not assassinated and dismembered by
menials who despise it, menials who slang one another openly in the
patois of Geneva, Luxembourg, or Naples. A singular survival, this
restaurant!... Moreover, the man was justified in his triumphant air.
Not only had he most intelligently brought me a fresh ice, but he had
brought the particular kind of rusk for which I had asked. There were
over thirty dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of course I had wanted
something that was not on it: a peculiar rusk, a rusk recondite and
unheard of by my fellow-diners. The man had hopefully said that he
"would see." And here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I felicitated
him, as an equa