Norgate nodded.
"An unimportant one, I should imagine. Hebblethwaite seemed thoroughly satisfied with himself and with life generally. He has gone down to Walton Heath to play golf."
Selingman led the way into the restaurant.
"Very good exercise for an English Cabinet Minister," he remarked, "capital for the muscles!"
CHAPTER XXIX
"I had no objection," Norgate remarked, a few hours later, "to lunching with you at the Berkeley—very good lunch it was, too—but to dine with you in Soho certainly seems to require some explanation. Why do we do it? Is it my punishment for a day's inactivity, because if so, I beg to protest. I did my best with Hebblethwaite this morning, and it was only because there was nothing for him to tell me that I heard nothing."
Selingman spread himself out at the little table and talked in voluble German to the portly head-waiter in greasy clothes. Then he turned to his guest.
"My young friend," he enjoined, "you should cultivate a spirit of optimism. I grant you that the place is small and close, that the odour of other people's dinners is repellent, that this cloth, perhaps, is not so clean as it once was, or the linen so fine as we are accustomed to. But what would you have? All sides of life come into the great scheme. It is here that we shall meet a person whom I need to meet, a person whom I do not choose to have visit me at my home, whom I do not choose to be seen with in any public place of great repute."
"I should say we were safe here from knocking against any of our friends!" Norgate observed. "Anyhow, the beer's all right."
They were served with light-coloured beer in tall, chased tumblers.
Selingman eyed his with approval.