She threw up her hands. We were lunching very well--the _petit vin_ of Auvergne is delicious--"_Mais voyons donc_--why all this ceremony among friends? Here we are, we three, and it is André, Horace, Elodie--and here we are, we four, and it is Monsieur Bakkus, and Lackaday--never will I be able to pronounce that word--and Madame Patou and Monsieur le Capitaine Hylton. Look. To my friends I am Elodie _tout court_--and you?" It was an embarrassing moment. Andrew's mug of a face was as expressionless as that of a sphinx. He would no more have dreamed of addressing me by my Christian name than of hailing Field-Marshal Haig as Douglas. White-haired, thin-lipped Bakkus smiled sardonically. But there was no help for it. "My very intimate friends call me Tony," said I. "To-ny," she echoed. "But it is charming, To-ny. A _votre santé_, To-ny." She held put her glass--I was sitting next to her. I clinked mine politely. "To the health of the charming Elodie." She was delighted. Made us all clink glasses. Bakkus said, in English: "To the abolition of Misters, in obedience to the Lady." "And now," cried Elodie, "what were you going to say about fashions in necklaces made of dogs' teeth?" We pursued our frivolous talk. Bakkus said: "The whole of the Fall of Man arose from Eve pestering Adam for a russet-brown fig-leaf in spring time." "It was after the fall that they made themselves aprons," said Lackaday. "She had her eye on those fig-leaves long before," retorted Bakkus. We laughed. There was no great provocation to mirth. But we were attuned to gaiety. My three friends were lunching with me on the terrace of the Royat Palace Hotel. It is a long, wide terrace, reaching the whole width of the façade of the building, and doors lead on to it from all the public rooms. Only half of it, directly accessible from the _salle à manger_ is given over to restaurant tables. Ours was on the outskirts. I like to be free, to have plenty of room and air; especially on a broiling August day. We were in cool shade. A few feet below us stretched a lower terrace, with grass-plots and flowers and a fountain and gaily awned garden seats and umbrella-shaded chairs. And there over the parapet the vine-clad hill quivered in the sunshine against the blue summer sky, and around us were cheerful folk at lunch forgetful of hearts and blood-pressure in the warm beauty of the day. Perhaps now and then a stern and elderly French couple--he stolid, strongly bearded and decorated, she thin and brown, over-coiffured and over-ringed--with an elderly angular daughter, hard to marry, regarded us with eyes of disapproval. Elodie in happy mood threw off restraint, as, in more private and intimate surroundings, she would have thrown off her corset. But we cared not for the disapproval of the correct French profiteers.... "If they tried to smile," said Elodie, incidentally, "they would burst and all the gold would drop out."