and next to them again a young husband and wife, who had brought out to dinner a pig-tailed little girl of six or seven, whose manners were most admirable, for she bade the waiter "Good-night" when she went away with all the grace of a duchess. Beyond these again was an elderly couple, who sat together at one side of a table, an affectionate Darby and Joan. My soup when it came tasted rather too strongly of pepper, but the fried cod was excellent. The _poulet au riz_ was all that it should be, and the pudding Gourmets was a simple version of the well-known pudding Diplomate. Prices have gone up a little at the Gourmets since my first visit there, owing, of course, to the general rise in the price of material. I was charged 3d. for the soup, 6d. for the cod; I had rushed into wild extravagance in ordering chicken, for that cost me 1s. 3d., and the price of the pudding Gourmets was 4d. XLVI THE MAXIM RESTAURANT There may not appear at first blush to be any close connection between Wardour Street, that length of it which lies between Shaftesbury Avenue and Coventry Street, and the pleasant Austrian watering-place of Marienbad; but whenever I traverse the thoroughfare where the wax figures simper in Clarkson's, the wig-maker's, windows, and where the French library at one of the corners always keeps some passers-by in front of it looking at the illustrated papers and post cards, the china figures and the covers of the novels, there rises before me when I come to the Maxim Restaurant a vision of hills covered with pine-woods and of the Café Rubezahl, a castellated building of great red roofs and turrets and spires, high up on the green hill-side, the café at which the late King Edward often drank the good Austrian coffee of an afternoon during his annual August trip to the town of healing waters.