"I can see you must have been very upset," she said gently, "though he _has_ only left you a pound a week. Still, that's better than a bat in the eye with a burnt stick." A bat in the eye with a burnt stick reminded him vaguely of encounters with the police; otherwise it conveyed no meaning to his mind. "I hope you haven't got to go on duty at once," she said after a pause. "Because you really do look as if you needed a rest, and a cup of tea or something of that, I'm quite ashamed to have come bothering you so soon." "Duty?" he questioned. "What duty?" "Why," she exclaimed, "haven't you got a new place?" "New place!" he repeated after. "What do you mean?" "Why, as valet." There was certainly danger in his tendency to forget that he was a valet. He collected himself. "No," he said, "I haven't got a new place." "Then why are you staying here?" she cried. "I thought you were simply here with a new master, Why are you staying here alone?" "Oh," he replied, abashed, "it seemed a convenient place. It was just by chance that I came here." "Convenient place indeed!" she said stoutly. "I never heard of such a thing!" He perceived that he had shocked her, pained her. He saw that some ingenious defence of himself was required; but he could find none. So he said, in his confusion-- "Suppose we go and have something to eat? I do want a bit of lunch, as you say, now I come to think of it. Will you?" "What? Here?" she demanded apprehensively. "Yes," he said. "Why not?" "Well--!" "Come along!" he said, with fine casualness, and conducted her to the eight swinging glass doors that led to the _salle à manger_ of the Grand Babylon. At each pair of doors was a living statue of dignity in cloth of gold. She passed these statues without a sign of fear, but when she saw the room itself, steeped in a supra-genteel calm, full of gowns and hats and everything that you read about in the _Lady's Pictorial,_ and the pennoned mast of a barge crossing the windows at the other end, she stopped suddenly. And one of the lord mayors of the Grand Babylon, wearing a mayoral chain, who had started out to meet them, stopped also. "No!" she said. "I don't feel as if I could eat here. I really couldn't." "But why?" "Well," she said, "I couldn't fancy it somehow. Can't we go somewhere else?" "Certainly we can," he agreed with an eagerness that was more than polite. She thanked him with another of her comfortable, sensible smiles--a smile that took all embarrassment out of the dilemma, as balm will take irritation from a wound. And gently she removed her hat and gown, and her gestures and speech, and her comfortableness, from those august precincts. And they descended to the grill-room, which was relatively noisy, and where her roses were less conspicuous than the helmet of Navarre, and her frock found its sisters and cousins from far lands. "I'm not much for these restaurants," she said, over grilled kidneys.