McTaggart noticed, with amusement, that the question of his own appetite never occurred to the fair speaker. Manlike, a trait which would have aggrieved his sense of mastership in his home, appeared to him as involving no martyrdom in this piquante egoist's hands. "Greedy child! As a matter of fact, I told my taxi to wait. It's such a nice one, almost new. I thought, perhaps, you'd like a drive?" "Merci, non." She drew her furs carefully about her shoulders, the gray head of the fox nestling under her little pink ear. "Lucky beast!" said McTaggart, with a gesture pointing his remark. "Why wasn't I born a fox?" "Because the English are born sheep!" Her topaz eyes flashed wickedly. "They only ask for a stupid leader--and off they go, baa ... baa ... quite contented--straggling down the same dull path paved with precepts." They passed out as she spoke and entered the narrow lift where a saddened-looking individual clung to the rope like a drowning man. Mrs. Merrod glanced at him, recognizing a new porter. "Slowly, please,"--she commanded. "I hate..." she explained to McTaggart--"to feel my feet running up my spine. Once when I went into the City to see my lawyer the lift went down at such a terrible pace, mon Dieu!--I found a boot-button in my hair." "You're sure it wasn't the top of a hat-pin?" McTaggart's voice was studiously grave. "Mais non! A button. But I'm not _quite_ certain whether it came off a boot..." The sad-looking porter, his back turned, relaxed into a sudden grin. He saw the pair into their taxi and stood for a moment watching them. "There goes a little bit of all right!"--he confided to the world at large. Then he solemnly spat on McTaggart's shilling "for luck" and burrowed back into the lift. CHAPTER VIII The Restaurant "Au Bon Bourgeois" faced on a dingy Soho street, the newly painted white door flanked by myrtle-trees in tubs. The entrance was through a narrow passage which led to a low room in the rear, divided from the one in front by a partition of plate glass. The latter place was reserved for the Cafe, where marble tables were closely packed on a red-tiled and sanded floor; and it boasted its own separate entrance, carefully remote from the other. It gave a Bohemian atmosphere to the newly opened Restaurant. For the diners in the room beyond could watch the ever-changing scene--undisturbed by smoke or chatter--like a slice of French life cut bodily from the gay capital over seas. The proprietor had been head-waiter in a fashionable London hotel; a shrewd Swiss--known as "Monsieur Auguste"--he had learned the secret underlying the modern demand for catering. He realized that the Englishman will readily pay an exorbitant price for rich food badly cooked in a first-class Restaurant; impervious to a hurried service, to overcrowding and noise, provided that the place held a fixed reputation for "smartness."