“Bien, monsieur. A table for two? Voici.”
He drew back an inviting chair.
“I should like this one by the window,” said Martin. The room being on the entresol, the ceiling was low and the place reeked with reproachful reminders of long-forgotten one-franc-fifty and two-franc meals.
“I am sorry, Monsieur,” replied the waiter, “but this table is reserved by a lady who takes here all her repasts. Monsieur can see that it is so by the half-finished bottle of mineral water.”
He held up the bottle of Evian in token of his veracity. Scrawled in pencil across the label ran the inscription, “Mlle. Hastings.”
“Mademoiselle Hastings!” cried Martin. “Why, that is the lady I am expecting.”
The waiter smiled copiously. Monsieur was a friend of Miss Hastings? Then it was a different matter. Mademoiselle said she would be back to-night and that was why her bottle of Evian had been preserved for her. She was the only one left of the enormous clientèle of the restaurant. It was a restaurant of students. In the students’ season, not a table for the chance comer. All engaged. The students paid so much per week or per month for nourishment. It really was a pension, enfin, for board without lodging. When the students were away from Paris the restaurant was kept open at a loss; not a very great loss, for in Paris one knew how to accommodate oneself to circumstance. Good provincials and English tourists sometimes wandered in. One always then indicated the decorations, real masterpieces some of them. . . . Only a day or two ago an American traveller had taken photographs. If Monsieur would deign to look round . . .
Martin deigned. Drawings in charcoal and crayon on the distempered walls, caricatures, bold nudes, bars of music, bits of satiric verse, flowing signatures, bore evidence of the passage of many generations of students.
“It amuses them,” said the waiter, “and gives the place a character.”
He was pointing out the masterpieces when a young voice by the door sang out: