"Convenient place indeed!" she said stoutly. "I never heard of such a thing!"
He perceived that he had shocked her, pained her. He saw that some ingenious defence of himself was required; but he could find none. So he said, in his confusion--
"Suppose we go and have something to eat? I do want a bit of lunch, as you say, now I come to think of it. Will you?"
"What? Here?" she demanded apprehensively.
"Yes," he said. "Why not?"
"Well--!"
"Come along!" he said, with fine casualness, and conducted her to the eight swinging glass doors that led to the salle à manger of the Grand Babylon. At each pair of doors was a living statue of dignity in cloth of gold. She passed these statues without a sign of fear, but when she saw the room itself, steeped in a supra-genteel calm, full of gowns and hats and everything that you read about in the Lady's Pictorial, and the pennoned mast of a barge crossing the windows at the other end, she stopped suddenly. And one of the lord mayors of the Grand Babylon, wearing a mayoral chain, who had started out to meet them, stopped also.
"No!" she said. "I don't feel as if I could eat here. I really couldn't."
"But why?"
"Well," she said, "I couldn't fancy it somehow. Can't we go somewhere else?"