The Major agreed with a sigh of relief. He had understood nothing of the mummery going on about him, but he was possessed by the conviction that in some way his party was the butt of the occasion, and had kept looking around abruptly, in hope of catching the angels giggling behind his back.
"Will you ask the waiter how much I owe?" He appealed to Beck.
How much!
Maxime picked these two essential words out of the rapid phrase like a squirrel snapping a peanut from its shell. He had not been garçon at the Café Américain for nothing, Maxime. His countenance assumed an expression of beatific innocence as he looked over the Major's head, at the high-priest in the gilded pulpit.
"Tain francs," he observed, mildly.
This was a tide in the affairs of P. Hamilton Beck which, plainly, must be taken at the flood. The elder Miss Cogswell was looking at him expectantly, and Heaven had, of a sudden, grown very still. He leaped into the breach with all the eloquence accumulated during eight months of French II.
"Mon foi, non! cream de mint coute seulement un franc la verre dans les établissements plus chers. Il ne faut pas nous voler, parceque nous sont étrangères!"
"What's that; what's that?" said the Major.
"He's trying to rob us," explained Beck, much excited. "Says it's ten francs. It can't possibly be more than five, and it ought to be two francs fifty."
The Major immediately became purple with indignation.