Two Briffault venues

One is the Breakfast Room at the Meurice Hotel, Paris.
Another, from THE NEW LIFE OF MR. MARTIN
The kasbah stood on the brow of the mountsain. At a distance below could be seen, above a screen of foliage, the palm groves fringing a sprawling wad'. Beyond the plain was a great spur of mountains, rugged in outline and red in hue; and beyond them again, a pale rose haze - the desert - misting into the violent violet-blue of the sky.
Dream or awakening, her surroundings invited Sheila to bask in their pleasantness and luxury. The windows of the room opened upon a fairy garden, Moorish beyond mistake, with raised green-tiled paths, a fountain with square basin, sunken beds of exquisite and strange exotic flowers, and peaceful cypresses.
When later they took coffee in the garden, above which a bright crescent glittered in the turquoise sky, Sid Harun returned to the mood that had been evoked. "Do you know the Arabic word horm?" he asked.
"It means something like 'sacred' or 'tabu,' does it not? The approaches to a mosque are horm, protected against desecration," Sheila replied.
"Excellent!" he exclaimed with pleased laughter. "You are, I see, a genuine student. But the connotation extends, as with many Arabic words, much farther than can be expressed in translation. Every person also has his or her horm - privacies, that is, of life and mind, rather than, as with us, of the body, which are acknowledged and respected. One great virtue the Islamic barbarians have: politeness. We laugh at the florid formulas of Oriental civility. They are, we hold, but hollow conventions. Those verbal ramparts extend to the privacies and intimacies of life. All this may seem ludicrous, but it preserves each human horm inviolate. The flowery politeness is, to my thinking, less barbaric than the heartiness which claps you on the back and calls you Charlie."