"Neither. But you'll have to wait. I'm not going to read my lines without the proper back-drop."
"Will The Fiesole do, or isn't that swell enough for the Doctor?"
"It will do nicely; he'll think he's slumming."
The Fiesole was Mary's favorite place, and this was the first time they had eaten there without her. Jean wondered if that were why it seemed so different. She felt that this was a new environment, and yet there were the same long rooms, stretching back from the street balcony on which they sat. There were the same waiters, hurrying at the same gait, as if they had been wound by machinery to a set speed which they could never lessen or increase by their individual wills. There was the same orchestra, sheltered behind the dingy palms, playing the same semi-classical, popular music. There was the steady buzz of talk and the same people might have been sitting there for months. The heat had in it the same feel of dust, as if it held the disillusioned souls of millions, ground to powder in their struggle for forgetfulness; there was the same odor of highly spiced food, like too strong scent; the same sensuous music, the passion in its heart hidden under the cloak of form, except when it broke through and flicked the senses, till men touched women's hands in filling their glasses and the women leaned across the table.
"Well, you look as if you had never seen it before. Doesn't it suit Fenninger, after all?"
Across the table Gregory was smiling. He looked happy and younger than Jean had ever seen him.
"Perfectly. But he'd like any place where he was the richest man in it and people could see him spend money."
While they waited for the first course, Gregory told her of Palmer's suggestions and Mrs. Palmer's struggle between pride at being able to spend as much as she liked, and uncertainty as to the taste.
"She has just one criterion, a hotel she once worked in that had green marble walls in the hall, and blue velvet furniture in the lobby. It was evidently large and rather quiet because she has kept an impression of something 'terribly genteel.' She measures everything by it, the timbre of your voice, the way you take off your hat, and the thickness of the stair carpet. She's as pretty as a picture. The whole thing would be repulsive, that old man wallowing in his money and passion for this child, except for a kind of honest eagerness in the girl herself. He wants to take her somewhere abroad to get the edges rubbed off, and give his grown children a chance to cool down. She'll get the edges rubbed off, and some of his, too, long before he thinks it's time to come home. But she'll always be grateful, and never let people make fun of him."
"Poor child. I hope they won't get rubbed too smooth before she sees the star again."