“I’m sure I cannot give you any reason, but it’s the fashion. You will find it everywhere.”
“And such a lot of things. I can guess at some names: ‘enter’ and ‘relieve’—hunger, I suppose.”
Here Miss Usher leant across and carefully explained the meaning of ‘entrée’ and ‘relève’—the names of the courses; whilst the girl listened, with both elbows firmly planted on the table.
“You should not sit like that, my child,” suggested the teacher of manners.
“No? But there’s a girl doing it over there,” argued the pupil; and, pointing with a taper finger, she indicated a young woman in a loud tea-gown with a towzled head and arms bare to the shoulder, who was holding forth to a shiny-faced, dissipated-looking man.
“Never mind, my dear, you need not take her for a model. Look at those two nice girls in white. Now have some fish?”
“Claret or Chablis, my lady?”
“No, thank ye,” she responded, “I never drink wine at all; but I’d be glad of a glass of spring water, or”—as an afterthought—“if ye have such a thing as a sup of fresh buttermilk?”
Without relaxing a muscle, the waiter replied: “We don’t supply buttermilk, my lady, but the water is the best.”
Lady Joseline ate little dinner, but devoured the company with a pair of eager, childish eyes. One lady she stigmatised as “a play actress,” another as “an old show, with feathers in her hair and scarcely a tack to her back.” Most of the men were “as like the waiters as two peas.” Then, to their special attendant—