"How dared you?" she demanded.
"I?" Jim was still bewildered. "What on earth did I do?"
"And before my very eyes!" said Muriel.
"But, my dear, I didn't do anything. It was the girl——"
"You permitted it."
"I hadn't time to forbid. Besides, it would have been absurd to forbid. And she meant it as a compliment."
"Not to you. Don't flatter yourself, Jim."
"Well, at any rate, my dear, it is merely another custom of the quarter that we are in. Really, I scarcely think you should object."
"It was the money that she liked, Jim. I think that, as for you, you couldn't have been more absurd even if you had forbidden her."
He quieted her as best he could. They would go, he said, to L'Abbaye, of which their chauffeur had spoken to them; and to L'Abbaye, that most gilded and most brilliant of all the night palaces of Montmartre, they went.