“You will serve it a little earlier. We will go out immediately afterwards, and we will return in time for you to prepare dinner. It is quite simple.”
She shook her head. “You are mad,” she said crossly.
“It is necessary that I should offer you something,” he went on scowling. “You comprehend me? I wish you to lunch with me to-day. I demand it, and you are not going to refuse me.”
He was very close to her in the little kitchen, and he spoke fiercely, bullyingly, exactly as she had spoken to him when insisting that he should live on credit with her for a while.
“You are very rude,” she parried.
“If I am rude, it is all the same to me,” he held out uncompromisingly. “You will lunch with me; I hold to it.”
“How can I be dressed?” she protested.
“That does not concern me. Arrange that as you can.”
It was the most curious invitation to a Christmas dinner imaginable.
At a quarter past twelve they issued forth side by side, heavily clad, into the mournful streets. The sky, slate-coloured, presaged snow. The air was bitterly cold, and yet damp. There were no fiacres in the little three-cornered place which forms the mouth of the Rue Clausel. In the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, a single empty omnibus was toiling up the steep glassy slope, the horses slipping and recovering themselves in response to the whip-cracking, which sounded in the streets as in an empty vault. Higher up, in the Rue Fontaine, one of the few shops that were open displayed this announcement: “A large selection of cheeses for New Year’s gifts.” They laughed.