“Dear no—I want to see you alone.”
“That’s the way I want to see YOU!”
she replied. “Like before.”
“Like before!” he gaily echoed. “But
I mean has she had her coffee?”
“No, nothing.”
“Then I’ll send it up to her. Madame!”
He had already, at the foot of the stair, called out
to the stout patronne, a lady who turned to
him from the bustling, breezy hall a countenance covered
with fresh matutinal powder and a bosom as capacious
as the velvet shelf of a chimneypiece, over which
her round white face, framed in its golden frizzle,
might have figured as a showy clock. He ordered,
with particular recommendations, Mrs. Wix’s
repast, and it was a charm to hear his easy brilliant
French: even his companion’s ignorance could
measure the perfection of it. The patronne,
rubbing her hands and breaking in with high swift
notes as into a florid duet, went with him to the
street, and while they talked a moment longer Maisie
remembered what Mrs. Wix had said about every one’s
liking him. It came out enough through the morning
powder, it came out enough in the heaving bosom, how
the landlady liked him. He had evidently ordered
something lovely for Mrs. Wix. "Et bien soigne,
n’est-ce-pas?"
"Soyez tranquille"—the patronne
beamed upon him. "Et pour Madame?"
"Madame?" he echoed—it just pulled
him up a little.
"Rien encore?"
“Rien encore. Come, Maisie.”
She hurried along with him, but on the way to the
cafe he said nothing.
After they were seated there it was different:
the place was not below the hotel, but further along
the quay; with wide, clear windows and a floor sprinkled
with bran in a manner that gave it for Maisie something
of the added charm of a circus. They had pretty
much to themselves the painted spaces and the red
plush benches; these were shared by a few scattered
gentlemen who picked teeth, with facial contortions,
behind little bare tables, and by an old personage
in particular, a very old personage with a red ribbon
in his buttonhole, whose manner of soaking buttered
rolls in coffee and then disposing of them in the little
that was left of the interval between his nose and
chin might at a less anxious hour have cast upon Maisie
an almost envious spell. They too had their cafe
au lait and their buttered rolls, determined by
Sir Claude’s asking her if she could with that
light aid wait till the hour of dejeuner. His
allusion to this meal gave her, in the shaded sprinkled
coolness, the scene, as she vaguely felt, of a sort
of ordered mirrored licence, the haunt of those—the
irregular, like herself—who went to bed
or who rose too late, something to think over while
she watched the white-aproned waiter perform as nimbly
with plates and saucers as a certain conjurer her
friend had in London taken her to a music-hall to
