ns 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 arr