It was here that Miss Walsh in her halting French asked where was Gustave, where was Monsieur Leroux?
"The men?" Madame gabbled. "Ah, for that, where would they be? Invisibles, so long as there is work to be done," with a half-indulgent laugh. "You will see also, in good time, you English ladies, that which the service militaire does for the men! They make their service. They return. They put themselves at their ease. Behold, they are required to do nothing further for the rest of their life. It is we, Mesdemoiselles, we who are accustomed to it; we other French wives. You also, you will see! Ah, hold, the oysters! Now, Etienne, you will dust me once again the seats of all these chairs, I say to you, and with a dry duster, I pray you, not a wet one; dry, dry, dry, dry, dry——"
In this exalting hubbub did Olwen pass the whole morning with her friend until the sallow little Italian waiter came down to announce that déjeuner was served.
They went up. How cool and quiet, it struck them, were those upper reaches of the hotel....
But as they were seeking their places a quick "Oh, come and look!" from Miss Walsh brought Olwen running to the side window. "Oh, here are the people——"
The procession of the French invités was coming down the road from the little tramway terminus. It was solemnly headed by the three little pigtailed Leroux girls, each holding by the hand another child, bare from mid-thigh to ankle, and wearing an adaptation of the sailor suit. After them, in a broken line of twos and ones and threes, came the grown-up people.
First and most resplendent of them appeared the individual whom Olwen rightly guessed to be the notaire from Bordeaux. He wore a white bowler hat, a white waistcoat, and he carried in his hands, which he held well out in front of him, a large bouquet tied with tricolour streamers and the Union Jacques which Madame Leroux had desired, and he overshadowed even his rotund endimanchée wife in her purple costume and forward raking hat, who bobbed in his wake. She was escorted by Monsieur Leroux. Next came Monsieur Popinot, the clerk from the passports office, all in black, but carrying Madame Popinot's pink parasol. She, a plump and pretty little woman, carried a year-old baby in a corolla of lace.
Then came a sister of Madame Leroux, as dark, as mercilessly intelligent as the manageress herself, talking eagerly to Pierre Tronchet, effective in his blue and red.
Another artilleriste on leave, evidently a comrade from the regiment, walked a pace or so behind them, between two silent young girls; then a trio of stout, bearded old men gesticulating freely, then a lady in another forward raking hat, then a party wearing deepest mourning, but wreathed in smiles, then others ... then again others.... Tronchets, Leroux, ramifications of both families, relatives, friends, and those whom it was intended to dazzle....
Olwen, gazing upon this cortège, suppressed a wish to think aloud of a rhyme of her childhood: