suspect his knowledge. It
was an injustice. She soon realised that the band was too noisy for
talk, and the sideboard too shattering even for coherent thought. She
knew, in fact, at the first encounter, that this was a bad table, and
that bad tables were to be avoided by any expert eye. She knew the
waiter was a bad waiter, and that Gaga was a bad host. She had her first
lesson in the art of dining out at a restaurant.

But she dined! She drank more wine than she had intended to do, and it
went to her head. She laughed, and became talkative, forgetting her
refined accent, and thereby enjoying herself very much more than she
would otherwise have done, and becoming a good and lively companion for
the meal. Gaga could not respond to her talk, because it quickly became
evident that, with all the good will in the world, he could not talk;
but as the wine reached his head also he began to laugh at her remarks,
and to look at her with such an expression of adoration in his chocolate
eyes that Sally grew more and more at ease and more and more familiar
with the passing of each minute, and the increasing effect of the wine
she had taken. She sparkled, less in her speech than in her exhilarated
and exhilarating manner. She was all nerves, all dancing coquettry.

"_Don't_ look at me like that!" she pleaded, archly. Gaga's eyes
glowed, and his mouth was stretched with laughing. "Make me feel as
if...."

"How do I look at you? How does it make you feel?" asked Gaga with that
kind of persistent seriousness with which a man talks to a pretty girl
when he has drunk enough wine. "Tell me, Sally, how does it make you
feel, Sally?" He reached his hand across the table, and laid it upon
hers. "I mean, Sally.... I mean, if it makes you feel.... I'm sorry,
d'you see? I look at you as I feel. I don't know how I look at you. I
look at you...."

Gaga was not at all drunk; he was merely sententious and sentimental.
Sally darted a roguish eye, first round her, and then at Gaga, enjoying
very specially this stage of the meal. It was all fun to her, all
flattering to her vanity, all a part of the noise and excitement and
well-being that was making her spirits mount. She allowed her hand to
remain under his for a moment; then tried to draw it away; then pinched
his thumb gently and recovered her liberty. Gaga was unlike Toby. He had
not the assurance of the physically vigorous. He was gentle, mild,
stammering, and ineffective. But he was giving