having. It was the
passion of my life after I first got back from abroad."

"Oh, I eat it alive," said Bertram. "I'm strong for seeing Paris." He
turned back to Eleanor; and her double embarrassment drove her on.

"Such a good time as I had with the Warks--their studio in Munich,
where I met all the German long-haired artists--a run to Paris in the
season--the dearest little village on the Coast of Brittany last
summer--and three weeks in incomparable London at the end. I haven't
thought of the ranch for a year and a half--Uncle Edward pays me the
compliment of saying that my profits fell off twenty per cent. under
Olsen's management--oh, isn't she a dear!"

For Madame Loisel, wearing a beaming and affable manner, had come
through the door and approached their table. Madame made it a point of
business honor to promote personal relations with her regular guests,
asking Jean how he liked the fish, assuring Jacques that the soup
would be better to-morrow. This visit of hers to the slumming party
came after a storm in the kitchen, whose French thunders had reached
the dining room now and then. Louis, the conservative, hated slummers
and dreaded being "discovered." He ran a restaurant as a social
institution as well as a business venture. Madame Loisel, with her eye
on the cash register, longed ardently for slummers who would give
large tips to Louis the younger, order expensive wines, and put the
Marseillaise on the way to a twenty-five cent table d'hote dinner.
From that kitchen squabble, recurrent whenever slummers visited them,
Madame Loisel swept in haughty determination, leaving Louis to take it
out on the pots. As she approached the table, all the charm of France
illuminated her smile.

She invariably paid slummers the compliment of addressing them in
French.

"_Bonsoir--le souper, plait-il vous_?" she asked.

Eleanor took her up in fluent French, and the talk sparkled back and
forth between them--reminiscences of this or that restaurant on the
boulevards which Madame Loisel had known in her youth and which
Eleanor had visited. Bertram, his mouth open, followed that talk as
though summoning all his Sophomore French to match a word here and
there. Kate Waddington, leaning again across her insurance man, was
the first to break in.

"I myself used to be keen on French when I came back from Europe, but
I'm out of practice. Please excuse me, Madame, if I speak English. How
can you do it at this price?"

"It is