, and to make the background complete Alexander
Harrison, with two or three American painters of his generation, was
dining at a near table.

He shall be nameless who gave the dinner at Marguery's. The dinner was
all it should have been, for we ate the sole called after the house. It
was the provider of it who proved wanting. I was brought up to believe
that the host, when there is a host, should pay his bill. A large part
of my life has been spent in getting rid of the things I was brought up
to believe, but this particular belief I have never been able to shed
and I confess I was taken aback--let me put it at that--when the white
paper neatly folded in a plate, served at the end of dinner, was passed
on to one of the guests. If the debt then run into was not paid does not
much matter after all these years, or perhaps if it was not it has the
more interest for the curious observer of modes and moods. In this case,
the whole incident could be reduced to a kindness on the part of the
debtor, sacrificing himself to show how right Bob Stevenson was when he
said, as Robert Louis Stevenson repeated after him in print, that while
the Anglo-Saxon can and does boast that he is not as Frenchmen in
certain matters of morals, it is his misfortune to be as little like
them in their vigorous definition of honesty and the obligation of
paying their debts.

That the fifth dinner was at the _Tour d'Argent_ is not an achievement
to be particularly proud of. On the contrary, it appears to me a trifle
banal as I look back to it, for fashion was at the time sending
Americans and English to the _Tour d'Argent_ just as it was driving them
on beautiful spring days into that horribly crowded afternoon tea place
in the _Rue Daunou_--wasn't it?--or to order their new gowns at the new
dressmakers in the _Rue de la Paix_, or to do any of the hundred and one
other things that proved them up to the times, at home in Paris,
initiated into _le dernier cri_ or whatever new phrase they thought set
the seal upon Parisian smartness. Frederic's face was as well known as
Ibsen's which it so resembled, his sanded floor was the talk of the
tourists, the distinguished foreigner struggled to have his name on
Frederic's _menu_, and as for Frederic's pressed duck it had degenerated
into as everyday a commonplace as an oyster stew in New York or a chop
from the grill in London. The bill at the end of the evening might be
all that the occasion demanded of the man