s a fool, if you'll excuse me saying the word.
Not but what this is good butter. I couldn't get as good in Putney for
less than eighteen pence."

She made him feel like a child who has a great deal to pick up from a
kindly but firm sister.

"No, thank you," she said, a little dryly, to the waiter who proffered a
further supply of chip potatoes.

"Now don't say they're cold," Priam laughed.

And she laughed also. "Shall I tell you one thing that puts me against
these restaurants?" she went on. "It's the feeling you have that you
don't know where the food's _been_. When you've got your kitchen close
to your dining-room and you can keep an eye on the stuff from the moment
the cart brings it, well, then, you do know a bit where you are. And you
can have your dishes served hot. It stands to reason," she said. "Where
is the kitchen here?"

"Somewhere down below," he replied apologetically.

"A cellar kitchen!" she exclaimed. "Why, in Putney they simply can't let
houses with cellar kitchens. No! No restaurants and hotels for me--not
for _choice_--that is, regularly."

"Still," he said, with a judicial air, "hotels are very convenient."

"Are they?" she said, meaning, "Prove it."

"For instance, here, there's a telephone in every room."

"You don't mean in the bedrooms?"

"Yes, in every bedroom."

"Well," she said, "you wouldn't catch me having a telephone in my
bedroom. I should never sleep if I knew there was a telephone in the
room! Fancy being forced to telephone every time you want--well! I And
how is one to know who there is at the other end of the telephone? No, I
don't like that. All that's all very well for gentlemen that haven't
been used to what I call _com_fort in a way of speaking. But----"

He saw that if he persisted, nothing soon would be left of that noble
pile, the Grand Babylon Hotel, save a heap of ruins. And, further, she
genuinely did cause him to feel that throughout his career he had always
missed the very best things of life, through being an uncherished,
ingenuous, easily satisfied man. A new sensation for him! For if any
male in Europe believed in his own capacity to make others make him
comfortable Priam Farll was that male.

"I've never been in Putney," he ventured, on a new track.

_Difficulty of Truth-telling_

As she informed him, with an ungrudging particularity, about Putney, and
her life at Putney, there gradually arose in his brain a vision of a
kind of existence such