For Madame Loisel, wearing a beaming and affable manner, had come through the door and approached their table. Madame made it a point of business honor to promote personal relations with her regular guests, asking Jean how he liked the fish, assuring Jacques that the soup would be better to-morrow. 90 This visit of hers to the slumming party came after a storm in the kitchen, whose French thunders had reached the dining room now and then. Louis, the conservative, hated slummers and dreaded being “discovered.” He ran a restaurant as a social institution as well as a business venture. Madame Loisel, with her eye on the cash register, longed ardently for slummers who would give large tips to Louis the younger, order expensive wines, and put the Marseillaise on the way to a twenty-five cent table d’hote dinner. From that kitchen squabble, recurrent whenever slummers visited them, Madame Loisel swept in haughty determination, leaving Louis to take it out on the pots. As she approached the table, all the charm of France illuminated her smile.
She invariably paid slummers the compliment of addressing them in French.
“Bonsoir—le souper, plait-il vous?” she asked.
Eleanor took her up in fluent French, and the talk sparkled back and forth between them—reminiscences of this or that restaurant on the boulevards which Madame Loisel had known in her youth and which Eleanor had 91 visited. Bertram, his mouth open, followed that talk as though summoning all his Sophomore French to match a word here and there. Kate Waddington, leaning again across her insurance man, was the first to break in.
“I myself used to be keen on French when I came back from Europe, but I’m out of practice. Please excuse me, Madame, if I speak English. How can you do it at this price?”
“It is kind of you to say so, Mademoiselle—economy and honesty.”
Masters patted Mark Heath on the knee.
“We can’t let you fellows go away from us now. One doesn’t get guides to the Latin quarter for nothing. Take us somewhere, Mr. Heath—unless you’re working to-night.”
“No, virtue has been rewarded,” said Mr. Heath. “I’m off to-night as a testimonial of esteem from the City Editor. What shall it be?”
Bertram Chester, taking up the talk again, laid out Kearney Street like a bill of fare. Mrs. Masters, casting her vote as chaperone, chose the Marionette Theatre tucked away under the shadow of the Broadway Jail.