It was a quiet evening on the day that I drove down with the little prima donna, but had I not telegraphed early in the day we should not have got the table for two by the open window that looked out on to the terrace and to the Thames in the valley below.
The little prima donna stood by the window and gazed out. She felt the charm of the scene, but fought against it, for she was a little piqued that she had never seen anything quite like it before, that the United States did not hold its exact parallel. "I guess it is that your landscapes are so small and so easily filled up that makes them so different from ours," was her explanation; but that was not what she meant.
The manager of the restaurant had told me that he had ordered a little dinner for me, some _hors-d'œuvre, petite marmite,_ red mullet, _tournedos, pommes sautées,_ a duckling, salad, and some ices; and I told him that that would do very nicely. The _hors-d'œuvre_ were on the table, but it was difficult, hungry as she was, to induce the little prima donna to leave her first view of the river, a river now grown steel-colour in the growing darkness, and to turn to the prosaic side of life, and dinner.
It is a comfortable dining-room, with its green curtains to the big bow-window, its paper with a flower pattern, its mirrors and its great panes of glass through which the arched looking-glasses of the hall can be seen. Of our fellow-diners there was no one whose face is well known to the world. There was a young man with gold buttons to his coat and a suggestion of the Georgian period in his full head of hair, who was dining _tête-à-tête_ with a pretty dark-haired lady; there was a bald-headed gentleman entertaining a family party; there were three young gentlemen dining by themselves very merrily; the rest were the people one sees at any good hotel.
The soup was excellent--though why managers of restaurants always seem to think that _petite marmite_ is the only soup in existence I do not know; but the prima donna was glad to put down her spoon and look out of the window again. She had read that morning, she told me, all the descriptions she could find of Richmond, in prose and verse; but the real thing was more beautiful than any description of it had prepared her for. I felt that the conversion of the little American was progressing.