The Hotel Marseillaise had familiar customs of its own. For one thing, guests bothered the waiters as little as possible. Masters smiled when the two unconscious youths went back to their table, picked up the big soup tureen, their knives and forks, their plates, and transported them to the larger table. They were dragging the lees of a rather squalid Bohemia, these two boys; a Bohemia the more real because they were unconscious in it. Its components were a cheap furnished room, restaurants like this, adventurous companionship in the underworld which thrust itself to the surface here and there in that master-port of the Saxon advance. Not for months had either of them been in the society of such women as these--women who preferred cleanliness to display, women who were nice about their nails and hair. A kind of pleasant shyness crept over Mark Heath; the spirit came into the face of Bertram Chester. Masters, tactician that he was, put the conversation into their hands. Presently, they were telling freely about the fare at Coffee John's, about their familiars and companions in the little Eddy-Street lodging house, about the drifters of the Latin quarter. They quite eclipsed the pale youth who was playing escort to Eleanor, and the substantial person in the insurance business who seemed to be responsible for Kate Waddington. Heath, speaking with a little diffidence and lack of assurance, had twice the wit, twice the eye for things, twice the illumination of Bertram Chester; yet it was the latter who brought laughter and attention. His personality, which surrounded him like an aroma, his smile, his trick of the eyes--one listened to Bertram Chester. * * * * * When the son of Louis brought in the little sweet oranges and arranged the goblets for black coffee, talk shifted from monologue to dialogue. Eleanor found herself talking to Bertram. A kind of pride had been rising in her all the evening; a pride born in recoil from her latest recollection of him. The episode of that night under the bay tree had gone with her clear across the Atlantic. Even the influence of the wholly new environment, in which she had grown from a girl recluse to a woman, had not served for a long time to erase that ugly stain on her memory. Here and now was the man who served so to perturb her once--and she could look on him, with her more mature eyes, as an attractive, unlicked young cub. She surprised herself taking revenge upon the past by a hidden patronage. At once, then, she fell to talking of Europe and the splendors she had lived there.