"Todo—todo—comida y toda," protested the tout. I had been waiting for this moment. In the conversation book which I had been studying was a phrase which had caught my fancy; it meant "no extras," but it was much more beautiful. The time had come.
"No hay extraordinario?" said I sternly.
"No, Señora, no," said the tout, spreading out his hands.
The matter having been thus settled, he took me downstairs again; and, in the dingy white diningroom, introduced me to a plump woman, the proprietress. I was ravenously hungry; the tables were laid. I asked:
"What time is lunch?"
"At two, Señora."
I was dismayed. It was now eleven o'clock—we had eaten little since the night before.
"But," I stammered, "I am hungry. Tengo hambre." My memory shuffled with conversation-book sentences and faint recollections of Majorca, but could find nothing about the minutiæ of food.
"Tengo hambre," I repeated desperately. Suddenly inspiration came to me. I made motions of beating up an omelet and clucked like a hen that has laid an egg.
For a moment there was a silence, a positive kind of silence, which is much more still than mere absence of noise. Then a roar of laughter went up. The fat hostess shook like a jelly, the tout guffawed behind a restraining hand—he had not yet received his tip—while an old woman who had been sitting in one of the darker corners, went off: