not have to see the beef killed for the
_filet_ which at the _Cabaret_ we were expected to eat after the tench
and with the potatoes to which the city of Lyons also gives its name, so
associating itself forever with the perfume of the onion. And, as in
the Provinces, the wine was the _petit vin gris_ which I never can drink
without a vision of the straight, white, poplar-lined roads of France,
sunshine, a tandem tricycle or two bicycles, J. and myself perched upon
them, and by the way friendly little inns with a good breakfast or
dinner waiting, and a big carafe of the pale light wine served with it.
That my dinner was comparatively cheap would at normal times have been
for me delightfully in its favour. But that it was the cheapest of all
in that week of dinners meant that I came out last in the race when, by
every law of justice, I should have been first. In Paris as in London my
"greedy column," as my friends called it with the straightforwardness
peculiar to friends, had to be written every week for the _Pall Mall_
and mine was the enviable position of finding my copy in eating good
dinners no less than in going to the _Salons_. If any one had an
irreproachable excuse for extravagant living, it was I.

But even I, with the excuse, could not afford the extravagance--one
weekly article did not pay for one cheap dinner for eight--at the
_Cabaret Lyonnais_. And as the rest of the party were without the excuse
and no better equipped for the extravagance, we never again gave each
other dinners on the same lavish scale and rarely on any scale,
henceforward ordering them on the principle of what Philadelphia in my
youth called "a Jersey treat." I do not say that economy was invariably
our rule. We could be, on occasions, so rash that before our week was up
we had to begin to count our francs, put by for the boat sandwich and
the reluctant tips of the return journey, and eat the last meals of all
in the Duval, which, if admirable as a place to economize in, is no more
conducive to gaiety than a London A.B.C. shop or Childs's in New York.
Once we were so reduced that at noon I was left to a lonely _brioche_ at
the _Salon_, and the men went to breakfast at the nearest cabman's
eating-house, where they made the sensation of their lives, without
meaning to and without finding in it any special compensation. The most
respectable of the respectable architectural group of our Thursday
nights was of the party and where he went the t