THE HOTEL CONTINENTAL (REGENT STREET)
"So you are the man who is writing those articles about 'Dinners and Diners,'" said old Sir George, when I dined quietly last week with him and Lady Carcanet. "Good Lord! Who'd have thought it!"
This sounded rather a dubious compliment; but pretty Miss Carcanet, "Brighteyes" as her family nickname is, began to take more interest in me than she had ever shown before.
Did I go alone, or did I really take the people I said I did? she asked. And I told her that I really did take the people I described. "Why don't you take Brighteyes to do one with you," said Sir George. "It's her first season, and she is seeing everything that London has to show. She has figured in print after the Drawing-Room, and one of the ladies' papers has had a portrait of her as a débutante of the season. Now you might lend your aid to immortalise her."
Miss Brighteyes said she would like it immensely, and though Lady Carcanet did not think it at all the thing for a young girl to dine at a restaurant alone with a gentleman, Sir George said something about there being no harm in being seen with an old buster, old enough to be her father—which was a doubtful compliment to my grey hair. I, of course, was delighted, and asked Miss Brighteyes to choose her day and her restaurant. There was the Berkeley, which had then just been reopened, the Avondale, which is going ahead with its new managers, Dieudonné's, the Continental. I wanted to dine at all of these, and would she take her choice.
"Is the Continental the hotel with a ruddy face and red pillars to its portico at the bottom of Regent Street?" Miss Brighteyes asked, and when I said that it was, she made that her choice.
"Dear me! Isn't that restaurant considered a little—well, a little fast?" came from Lady Carcanet, who very evidently disapproved of the whole of the proceedings; but I was able to reassure her on that subject. The ladies who sup in the upstairs rooms may not all be duchesses and countesses in their own right; but there is no more respectable place to dine at, and there is no better table d'hôte than is served in the downstairs room. I told Miss Brighteyes that if she wanted to see the restaurant at its best we should have to dine early, for most of the guests were sure to be going on to the theatre either as spectators or players.
On Thursday Miss Brighteyes was going to the Opera to hear the "Huguenots," and was to join her aunt there, so I was asked if Thursday would suit, and said "Perfectly." Lady Carcanet looked discouragingly on the whole matter; but said, very freezingly, that in that case we had better have the brougham, which could wait and take Miss Brighteyes to the Opera afterwards.
"Why didn't you come to my Drawing-Room Tea?" was the beginning of the cross-examination that I went through in the brougham, on our way to the restaurant; and I explained that as a recorder of dinners I considered myself exempt from teas, an answer which did not satisfy Miss Brighteyes, who pouted, and said that I might have made an exception in her favour.
Miss Brighteyes' cloak was deposited in a side room, my coat and hat were taken from me and put in a locker in the hall, and we settled ourselves down at a corner table in the room, dimly lighted by electric globes and by the red-shaded candles on the tables. It is a most effective room, as I pointed out to Miss Brighteyes, with its oil-paintings of figure-subjects framed in dark wood over the mantelpieces, its line of muslin-draped windows down one side, and on the other mirrors and the comptoir of dark wood, where between two palms one catches a glimpse, under the glow of a red-shaded lamp, of the pretty face of the lady enthroned there. A screen of old gold comes pleasantly into the scheme of colour. "Isn't it delightfully improper to be dining alone with a gentleman in a restaurant! I do wish Madame Quelquechose could see me now," Miss Brighteyes remarked, as I looked through the three menus, one at 10s. 6d., one at 7s. 6d., and one at 6s. 6d. Madame Quelquechose was, I may state, the head of the celebrated Parisian school at which Miss Brighteyes had finished her education.