"This reminds me of the places one slips into abroad," she said, "Mr. and Mrs. Wark--Lars Wark you know--took me to just such an old ruin in Paris. We dined for thirty centimes, I remember, but it was no better than this. I've had to go away to know my native city. That is the thing which strikes you when you come back--San Francisco is so like the Latin cities of Europe, and yet so unlike!" Kate leaned across her insurance man. "The Society for the Narration of European Travel is in session, Mr. Chester," she said. "I know the joy that Eleanor is having. It was the passion of my life after I first got back from abroad." "Oh, I eat it alive," said Bertram. "I'm strong for seeing Paris." He turned back to Eleanor; and her double embarrassment drove her on. "Such a good time as I had with the Warks--their studio in Munich, where I met all the German long-haired artists--a run to Paris in the season--the dearest little village on the Coast of Brittany last summer--and three weeks in incomparable London at the end. I haven't thought of the ranch for a year and a half--Uncle Edward pays me the compliment of saying that my profits fell off twenty per cent. under Olsen's management--oh, isn't she a dear!" For Madame Loisel, wearing a beaming and affable manner, had come through the door and approached their table. Madame made it a point of business honor to promote personal relations with her regular guests, asking Jean how he liked the fish, assuring Jacques that the soup would be better to-morrow. This visit of hers to the slumming party came after a storm in the kitchen, whose French thunders had reached the dining room now and then. Louis, the conservative, hated slummers and dreaded being "discovered." He ran a restaurant as a social institution as well as a business venture. Madame Loisel, with her eye on the cash register, longed ardently for slummers who would give large tips to Louis the younger, order expensive wines, and put the Marseillaise on the way to a twenty-five cent table d'hote dinner. From that kitchen squabble, recurrent whenever slummers visited them, Madame Loisel swept in haughty determination, leaving Louis to take it out on the pots. As she approached the table, all the charm of France illuminated her smile. She invariably paid slummers the compliment of addressing them in French. "_Bonsoir--le souper, plait-il vous_?" she asked. Eleanor took her up in fluent French, and the talk sparkled back and forth between them--reminiscences of this or that restaurant on the boulevards which Madame Loisel had known in her youth and which Eleanor had visited. Bertram, his mouth open, followed that talk as though summoning all his Sophomore French to match a word here and there. Kate Waddington, leaning again across her insurance man, was the first to break in.