He liked to correct his mother's English habit of "you-knowing" people who didn't know.
"And I really think I must call and try to do something for them."
"The d'Orient," said Fitz, "is where they have the elevator that you work yourself. Billy Molineux and I got caught in it between the third and fourth floors."
"Well," said his mother, "would you mind very much if we drove to the d'Orient now and called on the Burtons?"
Fitz said that he would mind very much, but as he made no more reasonable objection Mrs. Williams gave the order to Cunningham, and not long after they stopped before the d'Orient in the Rue Daunou, and Fontenoy flashed in with Mrs. and Master Williams's cards, and came out after an interval and stationed himself stiffly near the step of the victoria. This meant that Mrs. Burton was at home, as we say, or, "at herself," as the French have it. If he had leaped nimbly to his seat beside Cunningham on the box it would have meant that Mrs. Burton was not "at herself."
So once more Mrs. Williams became a lovely, trailing figure out of the seventh heaven, and Fitz, stoical but bored, followed her into the court-yard of the hotel. Here were little iron tables and chairs, four symmetrical flower-beds containing white gravel, four palm-trees in tubs, their leaves much speckled with coal smuts; a French family at breakfast (the stout father had unbuttoned his white waistcoat); and in a corner by herself an American child sitting upon one of the puff-seated iron chairs, one leg under her, one leg, long, thin, and black, swinging free, and across her lap a copy of a fashion paper.
On perceiving Mrs. Williams the child at once came forward, and dropped the most charming little courtesy imaginable.
"How do you do?" she said. "Poor, dear mamma isn't a bit well. But I said that she would see you, Mrs. Williams. She said yesterday that she wanted so much to see you."
In the event Mrs. Williams went up three flights in the elevator that you worked yourself; only on this occasion the proprietor, hastily slipping into his frock-coat and high hat (you could see him at it through the office window), worked it for her. And Fitz remained with the gloomy prospect of being entertained by little Miss Burton.
She was younger than Fitz by two years and older by ten—a serene, knowing, beautiful child. When Fitz proposed that they sit in the victoria, as softer than the iron chairs, she called him a funny boy, but she assented. And as they went she tossed aside her fashion paper, remarking, "You wouldn't care for that."