“Shouldn't what?” inquired Marguerite.
“Shouldn't put other people's affairs straight. It does not pay, especially if other people happen to be up a gum-tree—make yourself all sticky, you know.”
Marguerite looked at him doubtfully. “Ah!” she said. “That's what—is it?”
“That's what,” admitted Major White.
“That is the difference, I suppose, between a man and a woman,” said Marguerite, sitting down at a small table where breakfast had been laid for two. “A man looks on at things going—well, to the dogs—and smokes and thinks it isn't his business. A woman thinks the whole world is her business.”
“So it is, in a sense—it is her doing, at all events.”
Marguerite had turned to beckon to the waiter, and she paused to look back over her shoulder with shrewd, clear eyes.
“Ah!” she said mystically.
Then she addressed herself to the waiter, calling him “Kellner,” and speaking to him in German, in the full assurance that it would be his native tongue.
“I have told him,” she explained to White, “to bring your little coffee-pot and your little milk-jug and your little pat of butter to this table.”