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Updated: June 20, 2025
He had had no dealings with her in the way of business, for when he had had occasion to go into Ho Hans's tea-rooms, he was usually after bigger game than the graceful little dancer. It all came back to him in a flash. He had heard men at the club speaking of the grace of the Little Daffodil and her dancing had enjoyed something of a vogue amongst the young Britishers who were exiled in Shanghai.
The management of clubs, hotels, restaurants, tea-rooms, cafeterias, and lunch-rooms in connection with colleges, departmental stores, and banks, affords employment for those who have the gifts and training necessary.
None of the city fathers or their fashionable sons had even invited him to dinner. He went forth and had tea alone, while reading in an evening paper about the Austro-Serbian situation, in the tea-rooms attached to a cinema-palace. The gorgeous rooms, throbbing to two-steps and fox-trots, were crammed with customers; but the waitresses behaved competently.
They dined out more and more as spring drew on and the warm weather set in. The neighbourhood now was aglitter with eating places of all sorts and degrees, from the humble automat to the proud plush of the Sheridan Plaza dining room. There were tea-rooms, cafeterias, Hungarian cafés, chop suey restaurants.
To show that she was not a dupe, she arrived at the designated meeting-place nearly an hour later than the time appointed; but when she entered the Tea-Rooms the Princess was nowhere to be seen. The rooms were crowded, and Undine was guided toward a small inner apartment where isolated couples were absorbing refreshments in an atmosphere of intimacy that made it seem incongruous to be alone.
From all the continents the multitudes come to join in that procession: Americans, tagged with race-cards and intending hilarious disturbances; puzzled Americans, worn with guide-book plodding; Chinese princes in silk; queer Antillean dandies of swarthy origin and fortune; ruddy English, thinking of nothing; pallid English, with upper teeth bared and eyes hungrily searching for sign-boards of tea-rooms; over-Europeanised Japanese, unpleasantly immaculate; burnoosed sheiks from the desert, and red-fezzed Semitic peddlers; Italian nobles in English tweeds; Soudanese negroes swaggering in frock coats; slim Spaniards, squat Turks, travellers, idlers, exiles, fugitives, sportsmen all the tribes and kinds of men are tributary here to the Parisian stream which, on a fair day in spring, already overflows the banks with its own much-mingled waters.
No wonder the drapers have had to start luncheon and tea-rooms. They'll fix up small furnished flats soon, where a woman can live for a week." I said it was very trying, shopping. I also said, as he invited me, and as he appeared determined to go on talking, that I would have a brandy-and-soda. We were in the smoke-room by this time.
It was for three dollars and sixty cents. He felt congealed, but he talked on. He slid a five-dollar bill from his diminutive roll and gallantly paid up. His only comment when, in the car, Mother secretly asked how much he had been overcharged, was the reflection, "They certainly ought to make money out of those tea-rooms. Their profit must be something like five hundred per cent.
"And if you want to satisfy your extraordinary inquisitiveness any further, don't you think you'd better come right away now and offer me some tea somewhere?" "Splendid," I said. "Where?" "Oh! The Hanover, of course!" she answered. "Where's that?" I inquired. "Don't you know the Hanover Tea-rooms in Regent Street?" she exclaimed, staggered.
Now can you beat that? And tea-rooms is a safe, sound, interesting, genteel business if there ever was one. What have you got to say to that?" Father didn't often thus deluge her with words, but then he didn't often have a Revolutionary Idea. She had never heard of "overhead," and she was impressed; though in some dim confused way she rather associated "overhead" with the rafters of the tea-room.
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