"I have," said she, "for us two, eggs au beurre noir and a blanquette de veau, and what is enough for two is enough for three. And you must stay and eat with us as always."
"I wonder," said Bakkus, "whether Andrew realizes what a pearl you are."
So he stayed to lunch and repeated the story of his good fortune, to which Elodie listened enraptured as to a tale of hidden treasure of which he was the hero, but never a word could he find in criticism of Andrew's determination. The quips and causticities that a couple of years ago would have flowed from his thin, ironical lips, were arrested unformulated at the back of his brain. He became aware, not so much of a change as of a swift development of the sterner side of Andrew's character. Of himself he could talk sardonically enough. He could twit Elodie with her foibles in his old way. But of Andrew with his weather-beaten mug of a face marked with new, deep lines of thought and pain, sitting there courteous and simple, yet preoccupied, strangely aloof, the easy cynic felt curiously afraid. And when Elodie taxed him with pusillanimity he glanced at Andrew.
"He has made up his mind," he replied. "Some people's minds are made up of sand and water. Others of stuff composed of builders' weird materials that harden into concrete. Others again have iron bars run through the mass--reinforced concrete. That's Andrew. It's a beast of a mind to deal with, as we have often found, my dear. But what would you have? The animal is built that way."
"You flatter me," grinned Andrew, "but I don't see what the necessity of earning bread and butter has to do with a reinforced-concrete mind."
"It's such an undignified way of earning it," protested Elodie.
"I think," said Bakkus, "it will take as much courage for our poor friend to re-become Petit Patou, as it took for him to become General Lackaday."
Andrew's face suddenly glowed and he shot out his long arm with his bony wrists many inches from his cuff and put his delicate hand on Bakkus's shoulder.
"My dear fellow, why can't you always talk like that?"
"I'm going to," replied Bakkus, pausing in the act of lighting one of Elodie's special reserve of pre-war cigars. "Don't you realize I'm just transplanted from a forcing bed of High Anglican platitude?"