But however homely the hotel may be in France, it is rarely free from the blemish of the _upper room_. Officers may dine gaily with their lady friends with as little obstruction from the management as is offered to the payment of the bill.
We had our Christmas dinner at the Bons Enfants. It was not home, but it was very jolly. Jolly is the word rather than happy. At home the grub would not have been French. There would have been sisters (and others) with whom to make merry afterwards. And we would (we hope) have been served by someone less unlovely than the well-meaning middle-aged woman whom madame detailed to wait upon our table. But we sang long and loud in chorus; and afterwards went into the hall and took possession of the piano and danced with each other; and those who couldn't dance improvised some sort of rhythmic evolutions about the room. At any rate, we were gay. We were determined that absence from home was not going to seem to make us sad. And perhaps some of us forced the merriment rather obviously. But madame, I believe, thought we were completely happy. She came and shook us all by the hand at parting, and gave us good wishes, and was happy she should have helped us so far to Christmas jollity in "a furrin clime." Someone reproached her with the plebeian features of our waitress when we had got out into the shelter of the street, and someone--I forget who--kissed her (_i.e._, madame) in the shadow of the porch; and she gave a gentle little scream of delight, retrospective of the days of her blooming youth when she was more prone to thoroughgoing reciprocity.
We returned some weeks later. Someone of the mess had a birthday, and went down in the morning to madame and in the sunny courtyard talked to her intimately of pullets, and _poisson_, and _boisson_, and _omelettes_, and wafers, and cheeses, and fruits; returned to the mess before lunch, furtively countermanded the standing orders amongst the servants for the evening meal, and at lunch flung out a general invitation to the Bons Enfants at eight. We lived again through the Christmas festivities--with the difference that madame detailed a less unhandsome wench to wait on table; and that we left earlier.