“Ah! I was at the Europe,” he laughed. “I find their cooking better. Their sterlet is even better than the Hermitage at Moscow. Jules, the chef, was at Cubat’s, in the Nevski, for years.”
Pennington always gauged a hotel by the excellence of its chef. He told us of tiny obscure places in Italy which he knew, where the rooms were carpetless and comfortless, but where the cooking could vie with the Savoy or Carlton in London. He mentioned the Giaponne in Leghorn, the Tazza d’Oro in Lucca, and the Vapore in Venice, of all three of which I had had experience, and I fully corroborated what he said. He was a man who ate his strawberries with a quarter of a liqueur-glass of maraschino thrown over them, and a slight addition of pepper, and he always mixed his salads himself.
“Perhaps you think me very whimsical,” he laughed across the table, “but really, good cooking makes so much difference to life.”
I told him that, as an Englishman, I preferred plainly-cooked food.
“Which is usually heavy and indigestible, I fear,” he declared. “What, now, could be more indigestible than our English roast beef and plum pudding—eh?”
My own thoughts were, however, running in an entirely different channel, and when presently Sylvia, who looked a delightful picture in ivory chiffon, and wearing the diamond necklet I had given her as one of her wedding presents, rose and left us to our cigars, I said suddenly—
“I say, Pennington, do you happen to know a stout, grey-bearded Frenchman who wears gold-rimmed glasses—a man named Pierre Delanne?”
“Delanne?” he repeated. “No, I don’t recollect the name.”
“I saw him in Manchester,” I exclaimed. “He was at the Midland, and said he knew you—and also Sylvia.”