Florindo and Lindora had come to the
end of another winter in town, and had packed up for
another summer in the country. They were sitting
together over their last breakfast until the taxi should
arrive to whirl them away to the station, and were
brooding in a joint gloom from the effect of the dinner
they had eaten at the house of a friend the night
before, and, “Well, thank goodness,” she
said, “there is an end to that sort of thing
for one while.”
“An end to that thing,”
he partially assented, “but not that sort
of thing.”
“What do you mean?” she
demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.
“I mean that the lunch is of
the nature of the dinner, and that in the country
we shall begin lunching where we left off dining.”
“Not instantly,” she protested
shrilly. “There will be nobody there for
a while not for a whole month, nearly.”
“They will be there before you
can turn round, almost; and then you women will begin
feeding one another there before you have well left
off here.”
“We women!” she protested.
“Yes, you you women. You give
the dinners. Can you deny it?”
“It’s because we can’t get you to
the lunches.”
“In the country you can; and so you will give
the lunches.”
“We would give dinners if it
were not for the distance, and the darkness on those
bad roads.”
“I don’t see where your reasoning is carrying
you.”
“No,” she despaired, “there
is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of
it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time
before it is all going on again.”
They computed the number of dinners
they had given during the winter; that was not hard,
and the sum was not great: six or seven at the
most, large and small. When it came to the dinners
they had received, it was another thing; but still
she considered, “Were they really so few?
It’s nothing to what the English do. They
never dine alone at home, and they never dine alone
abroad of course not! I wonder they
can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept
kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup,
if there aren’t oysters first, or grape-fruit,
or melon, and the fish, and the entree, and the roast
and salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody
touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and cigars how
I hate it all!”
Lindora sank back in her chair and
toyed desperately with the fragment of bacon on her
plate.
“And yet,” Florindo said,
“there is a charm about the first dinner of
autumn, after you’ve got back.”
“Oh, yes,” she assented;
“it’s like a part of our lost youth.
We think all the dinners of the winter will be like
that, and we come away beaming.”
“But when it keeps on and there’s
more and more of our lost youth, till it comes to
being the whole
“Florindo!” she stopped
him. He pretended that he was not going to have
said it, and she resumed, dreamily, “I wonder
what it is makes it so detestable as the winter goes
on.”
“All customs are detestable,
the best of them,” he suggested, “and I
should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner,
that the society dinner was an unlovely rite.
You try to carry if off with china and glass, and
silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds
on these, or even on the dishes of the dinner as they
come successively on, it would be all very well; but
the diners, the diners!”
“Yes,” she said, “the
old men are hideous, certainly; and the young ones I
try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows
of their faces with spoons and forks
“Better than when it was done
with knives! Still, it’s a horror!
A veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a
hideous spectacle. Often he has few teeth of
his own, and the dentists don’t serve him perfectly.
He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth,
both liquids and solids: better not look!
His eyes bulge and roll in his head in the stress
of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and
spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his
person seems to swell vividly in his chair, and when
he laughs
“Don’t, Florindo! It is awful.”
“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 impasse 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 superstition 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 shirk 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.”
“We might call art to our aid have
a large tableful of people kodaked in the moments
of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied
from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture
postals, or from films for the movies. That
would give the ten and twenty cent audiences a chance
to see what life in the exclusive circles was.”
She listened in dreamy inattention.
“It was a step in the right direction when people
began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there
was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn’t
take them, and most women could manage their
teacups gracefully.”
“Or hide their faces in them when they couldn’t.”
“Only,” she continued,
“the men wouldn’t come after the first
go off. It was as bad as lunches. Now that
the English way of serving tea to callers has come
in, it’s better. You really get the men,
and it keeps them from taking cocktails so much.”
“They’re rather glad of
that. But still, still, there’s the guttling
and guzzling.”
“It’s reduced to a minimum.”
“But it’s there.
And the first thing you know you’ve loaded yourself
up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite
for dinner. No, afternoon tea must go with the
rest of it, if we’re going to be truly civilized.
If people could come to one another’s tables
with full minds instead of stomachs, there would be
some excuse for hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed
the practice of the professional diner-out, and read
up at home as he now eats at home, and
No, I don’t see how it could be done. But
we might take a leaf from the book of people who are
not in society. They never ask anybody to meals
if they can possibly help it; if some one happens
in at meal-times they tell him to pull up a chair if
they have to, or he shows no signs first of going.
But even among these people the instinct of hospitality the
feeding form of it lurks somewhere.
In our farm-boarding days
“Don’t speak of them!” she implored.
“We once went to an evening
party,” he pursued, “where raw apples and
cold water were served.”
“I thought I should die of hunger.
And when we got home to our own farmer’s we
ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper.
It wasn’t much. There!” Lindora screamed.
“There is the taxi!” And the shuddering
sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated
from the street. “Come!”
“How the instinct of economy
lingers in us, too, long after the use of it is outgrown.
It’s as bad as the instinct of hospitality.
We could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort
of sitting here over these broken victuals
“I tell you we shall be left,”
she retorted; and in the thirty-five minutes they
had at the station before their train started she
outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant
to put in force as soon as people began to gather
in summer force at Lobster Cove.
He derided the notion; but she said,
“You will see!” and in rather more time
than it takes to tell it they were settled in their
cottage, where, after some unavoidable changes of
cook and laundress, they were soon in perfect running
order.
By this time Lobster Cove was in the
full tide of lunching and being lunched. The
lunches were almost exclusively ladies’ lunches,
and the ladies came to them with appetites sharpened
by the incomparable air of those real Lobster Cove
days which were all cloudless skies and west winds,
and by the vigorous automobile exercise of getting
to one another’s cottages. They seized
every pretext for giving these feasts, marked each
by some vivid touch of invention within the limits
of the graceful convention which all felt bound not
to transcend. It was some surprising flavor in
the salad, or some touch of color appealing to the
eye only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or
some daring substitution of a native dish for it,
as strawberry or peach shortcake; or some bold transposition
in the order of the courses; or some capricious arrangement
of the decoration, or the use of wild flowers, or
even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the
local florist’s flowers, which set the ladies
screaming at the moment and talking of it till the
next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next
day, or the next but one, according as a new cottager’s
claims insisted or a lady had a change of guests,
or three days at the latest, for no reason.
In their rapid succession people scarcely
noticed that Lindora had not given a lunch, and she
had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment of the
others’ lunches that she had half forgotten her
high purposes of reform, when she was sharply recalled
to them by a lunch which had not at all agreed with
her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor, and
many people had asked one another whether they had
heard how she was. Then she took her good resolution
in both hands and gave an afternoon, asking people
by note or ’phone simply whether they would
not come in at four sharp. People were a good
deal mystified, but for this very reason everybody
came. Some of them came from somebody’s
lunch, which had been so nice that they lingered over
it till four, and then walked, partly to fill in the
time and partly to walk off the lunch, as there would
be sure to be something at Lindora’s later on.
It would be invidious to say what
the nature of Lindora’s entertainment was.
It was certainly to the last degree original, and
those who said the worst of it could say no worse than
that it was queer. It quite filled the time till
six o’clock, and may be perhaps best described
as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though
what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved.
Whatever it was, whether original or queer, it was
certainly novel.
A good many men had come, one at least
to every five ladies, but as the time passed and a
certain blankness began to gather over the spirits
of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair
which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture.
At each unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation,
and when the end came, it came so without accent,
so without anything but the clock to mark it as the
close, that they could hardly get themselves together
for going away. They did what was nice and right,
of course, in thanking Lindora for her fascinating
afternoon, but when they were well beyond hearing
one said to another: “Well, I shall certainly
have an appetite for my dinner to-night!
Why, if there had only been a cup of the weakest kind
of tea, or even of cold water!”
Then those who had come in autos gathered
as many pedestrians into them as they would hold in
leaving the house, or caught them up fainting by the
way.
Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.
“Well, my dear,” he said,
“it’s been a wonderful afternoon; an immense
stride forward in the cause of anti-eating or
“Don’t speak to me!” she
cried.
“But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn’t
it?”
“Hungry!” she hurled
back at him. “I could eat a I
don’t know what!”