LITMIR.BIZ

      III

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      After her companions left her Lady Agnes rested for five minutes in silence with her elder daughter, at the end of which time she observed: “I suppose one must have food at any rate,” and, getting up, quitted the place where they had been sitting. “And where are we to go? I hate eating out of doors,” she went on.

      “Dear me, when one comes to Paris —!” Grace returned in a tone apparently implying that in so rash an adventure one must be prepared for compromises and concessions. The two ladies wandered to where they saw a large sign of “Buffet” suspended in the air, entering a precinct reserved for little white-clothed tables, straw-covered chairs and long-aproned waiters. One of these functionaries approached them with eagerness and with a “Mesdames sont seules?“ receiving in return from her ladyship the slightly snappish announcement “Non; nous sommes beaucoup!“ He introduced them to a table larger than most of the others, and under his protection they took their places at it and began rather languidly and vaguely to consider the question of the repast. The waiter had placed a carte in Lady Agnes’s hands and she studied it, through her eye-glass, with a failure of interest, while he enumerated with professional fluency the resources of the establishment and Grace watched the people at the other tables. She was hungry and had already broken a morsel from a long glazed roll.

      “Not cold beef and pickles, you know,” she observed to her mother. Lady Agnes gave no heed to this profane remark, but dropped her eye-glass and laid down the greasy document. “What does it signify? I daresay it’s all nasty,” Grace continued; and she added inconsequently: “If Peter comes he’s sure to be particular.”

      “Let him first be particular to come!” her ladyship exclaimed, turning a cold eye upon the waiter.

      “Poulet chasseur, filets mignons sauce bearnaise,“ the man suggested.

      “You’ll give us what I tell you,” said Lady Agnes; and she mentioned with distinctness and authority the dishes of which she desired that the meal should be composed. He interjected three or four more suggestions, but as they produced absolutely no impression on her he became silent and submissive, doing justice apparently to her ideas. For Lady Agnes had ideas, and, though it had suited her humour ten minutes before to profess herself helpless in such a case, the manner in which she imposed them on the waiter as original, practical, and economical, showed the high executive woman, the mother of children, the daughter of earls, the consort of an official, the dispenser of hospitality, looking back upon a lifetime of luncheons. She carried many cares, and the feeding of multitudes — she was honourably conscious of having fed them decently, as she had always done everything — had ever been one of them. “Everything’s absurdly dear,” she remarked to her daughter as the waiter went away. To this remark Grace made no answer. She had been used for a long time back to hearing that everything was very dear; it was what one always expected. So she found the case herself, but she was silent and inventive about it, and nothing further passed, in the way of conversation with her mother, while they waited for the latter’s orders to be executed, till Lady Agnes reflected audibly: “He makes me unhappy, the way he talks about Julia.”

      “Sometimes I think he does it to torment one. One can’t mention her!” Grace responded.

      “It’s better not to mention her, but to leave it alone.”

      “Yet he never mentions her of himself.”

      “In some cases that’s supposed to show that people like people — though of course something more’s required to prove it,” Lady Agnes continued to meditate. “Sometimes I think he’s thinking of her, then at others I can’t fancy what he’s thinking of.”

      “It would be awfully suitable,” said Grace, biting her roll.

      Her companion had a pause, as if looking for some higher ground to put it upon. Then she appeared to find this loftier level in the observation: “Of course he must like her — he has known her always.”

      “Nothing can be plainer than that she likes him,” Grace opined.

      “Poor Julia!” Lady Agnes almost wailed; and her tone suggested that she knew more about that than she was ready to state.

      “It isn’t as if she wasn’t clever and well read,” her daughter went on. “If there were nothing else there would be a reason in her being so interested in politics, in everything that he is.”

      “Ah what Nick is — that’s what I sometimes wonder!”

      Grace eyed her parent in some despair: “Why, mother, isn’t he going to be like papa?” She waited for an answer that didn’t come; after which she pursued: “I thought you thought him so like him already.”

      “Well, I don’t,” said Lady Agnes quietly.

      “Who is then? Certainly Percy isn’t.”

      Lady Agnes was silent a space. “There’s no one like your father.”

      “Dear papa!” Grace handsomely concurred. Then with a rapid transition: “It would be so jolly for all of us — she’d be so nice to us.”

      “She’s that already — in her way,” said Lady Agnes conscientiously, having followed the return, quick as it was. “Much good does it do her!” And she reproduced the note of her bitterness of a moment before.

      “It does her some good that one should look out for her. I do, and I think she knows it,” Grace declared. “One can at any rate keep other women off.”

      “Don’t meddle — you’re very clumsy,” was her mother’s

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