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.
XXX
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 see.
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