but after
what you have said----"

"Yes," said Edmund; "I will leave you and I will write to you
to-night."

CHAPTER XXVIII

DINNER AT TWO SHILLINGS

Edmund Grosse was in great moral and great physical discomfort that
evening. He dined, actually for the first time, in just such an Italian
cafe as he had described to Molly. After climbing up a very narrow,
dirty staircase, the hot air heavy with smells, he had emerged into a
small back and front room holding some half-dozen tables, at each of
which four people could be seated. Through the open windows the noises
of the street below came into collision with the clatter of plates and
knives and forks. The heat was intense, the cloths were not clean,
neither were the hands of the two waiters who rushed about with a
certain litheness and facility of motion unlike any Englishman.

Edmund sat down wearily at a table as near the window as possible, and
at which several people had been dining, perhaps well, but certainly not
tidily.

"Hunger alone," he thought, "could make this possible," when, looking
up, he caught the face of a young man at a further table, full of
enjoyment, ordering "spargetty" and half a bottle of "grayves," with a
cockney twang, and an unutterable air of latter-day culture.

"Mutton chops, cheese, and ale fed your forefathers," reflected Grosse.

"What will you have, sir?" in a foreign accent.

"Oh! anything; just what comes for the two shilling dinner--no, not
_hors d'oeuvres_; yes, soup."

Edmund had turned with ill-restrained disgust from the sardines,
tomatoes, and other oily horrors. But there was no denying the qualities
of the soup: the most experienced and cultivated palate and stomach must
be soothed by it, and in a moment of greater cheerfulness Edmund turned
his attention to three young men close to him who were talking French.
Their hands were clean and their collars, but poverty was writ large on
their spare faces and well-brushed clothes. One was olive-complexioned,
one quite fair, but with olive tints in the shadows round the eyes, and
the third grey, old, and purple-cheeked from shaving. They ate little,
but they talked much. The talked of literature and art with fierce
dogmatism, and they seemed frequently on the verge of a quarrel, but the
storm each time sank quite suddenly without the least consciousness of
the danger passed. They looked at the food as critics, and acknowledged
it to be eatable, with the faint air o