At Montreuil-sur-Mer
Jones and I lunched at the Hôtel de France where we found everything very good. As we were going out, the landlady, getting on towards eighty, with a bookish nose, pale blue eyes and a Giovanni Bellini’s Loredano Loredani kind of expression, came up to us and said, in sweetly apologetic accents:—
“Avez-vous donc déjeuné à peu près selon vos idées, Messieurs?”
It would have been too much for her to suppose that she had been able to give us a repast that had fully realised our ideals, still she hoped that these had been, at any rate, adumbrated in the luncheon she had provided. Dear old thing: of course they had and a great deal more than adumbrated. [26 December, 1901.]