"Well, will you have escargots?"
"What's that?"
"Snails."
Sally shook her head with a grimace and smiled. Berthe tittered with laughter.
"Monsieur is funning, he would not eat escargots himself." She smiled at Sally, the smile that opens confidence and invites you within; no grudging of it between the teeth, ill-favoured and starved, as we do the thing in this country.
"However did you find this lovely little place?" asked Sally, when the girl had gone with Traill's order.
"Deux consommés, deux!" shouted Berthe through a door at the end of the room. "Deux consommés, deux!" came the distant echo from the kitchen.
Traill leant his elbow on the table and looked at her—let his eyes rest on every feature, last of all her eyes, and held them.
"By not looking for it," he said. "By passing it one evening at about the time for dinner, seeing the new-old bottle-panes in the leaded windows, looking down these stairs and getting a rough-drawn impression that the place was cosy, a rough-drawn impression in which the bottle-panes suggested that they had some sort of ideas in their heads, these people—and the little pots of evergreen down the stairs with the ugly red frilled paper round them that made you think that they had known the country—lived in it. All that blurred together in a mazy idea that it was sure to be cosy. Then I came downstairs, saw all these little tables with their vases of flowers, the spotless serviettes sticking up like white horns out of the wine-glasses, saw the beaming face of Berthe over there; was greeted with, 'Bon soir, Monsieur;' and so I dined. That's a year and a half ago. I've had my dinner, on an average, three times a week here ever since."
"It must be nice to be a man," said Sally.