Part 17 (1/2)
”Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending to overweight and bulking above her plate--”
”Yes, yes! That's dreadful, too. But when people are young--”
”Oh, when people are young!” He said this in despair. Then he went on in an audible muse. ”When people are young they are not only in their own youth; they are in the youth of the world, the race. They dine, but they don't think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think--” he broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, ”they think of themselves. And they don't think of how they are looking.”
”They needn't; they are looking very well. Don't keep harping on that!
I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I don't mean when I was a girl; a girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it: the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the champagne and getting into one's nose; and the laughing and joking and talking! Oh, the talking! What's become of it? The talking, last night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to tell, women as well as men! You can't deny it was beautiful.”
”I don't; and I don't deny that the forms of dining are still charming. It's the dining itself that I object to.”
”That's because your digestion is bad.”
”Isn't yours?”
”Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?”
”It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called an _impa.s.se_ in French.” He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little jump in her chair. ”Oh, there's plenty of time. The taxi won't be here for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?”
”There will be,” she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot.
”But I don't like being scared out of half a year's growth.”
”I'm sorry. I won't look at the clock any more; I don't care if we're left. Where were we? Oh, I remember--the objection to dining itself.
If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all right. Our superst.i.tion is that we can't be gay without gorging; that society can't be run without meat and drink. But don't you remember when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses where we thought it such a favor to be asked?”
”I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn't go to the American and English houses where they weren't sure of supper. They didn't give supper at the Italian houses because they couldn't afford it.”
”I know that. I believe they do, now. But--
'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'
and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now.
It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed--the sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper.”
”I wonder,” Lindora said, ”whether the same sort of thing goes on at evening parties still--it's so long since I've been at one. It was awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating _vis-a-vis_ with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn't much better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling, with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws champing as you looked up at them from below!”
”Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and trying to smile and look _spirituelle_ between the shots.”
Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on the back of her hand in the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. ”Yes,”
she said, ”awful, awful! Why _should_ people want to flock together when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival of the primitive hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it with those who had nothing?”
”Possibly,” Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary deference, or show of it. ”But the people who mostly meet to feed together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they loathe the sight of the things. Some of them s.h.i.+rk the consequences by frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the courses.”
”Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of hospitality.”
”Well, I don't know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing how funny the feeders all look.”
”I wonder, I _do_ wonder, how the feeding in common came to be the custom,” she said, thoughtfully. ”Of course where it's done for convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses--but to do it wantonly, as people do in society, it ought to be stopped.”