n my ear:

"I say, suppose we go and have a bottle of 'fizz' with some girls! Eh?"

I could not prevent myself from laughing heartily.

"Just as you like; come along, let us go."

ALWAYS LOCK THE DOOR!

The four glasses which were standing in front of the diners were now
still nearly half full, which is a sign, as a general rule, that the
guests are quite so. They were beginning to speak without waiting for an
answer; no one took any notice of anything except what was going on
inside him, either in his mind or stomach; voices grew louder, gestures
more animated, eyes brighter.

It was a bachelors' dinner of confirmed old bachelors. They had
instituted this regular banquet twenty years before, christening it "The
Celibate," and at the time there were fourteen of them, all fully
determined never to marry. Now there were only four of them left; three
were dead and the other seven were married.

These four stuck firmly to it, and, as far as lay in their power, they
scrupulously observed the rules which had been laid down at the
beginning of their curious association. They had sworn, hand-in-hand, to
turn aside every woman they could from the right path, and their
friends' wives for choice, and more especially those of their most
intimate friends. For this reason, as soon as any of them left the
society, in order to set up in domestic life for himself, he took care
to quarrel definitely with all his former companions.

Besides this, they were pledged at every dinner to relate most minutely
their last adventures, which had given rise to this familiar phrase
amongst them:

"To lie like an old bachelor."

They professed, moreover, the most profound contempt for woman whom they
talked of as an animal made solely for their pleasure. Every moment they
quoted Schopenhauer, who was their god, and his well-known essay "On
Women;" they wished that harems and towers might be reintroduced, and
had the ancient maxim: "Mulier, perpetuus infans,"[10] woven into their
table-linen, and below it, the line of Alfred de Vigny's:

_La femme, enfant malade et douze fois impure._[11]

So that by dint of despising women they lived only for them, while all
their efforts and all their desires were directed towards them.

Those of them who had married called them old fops, made fun of them,
and--feared them.

When they began to feel the exhilarating effects of the champagne, this
was the moment that their old bachelor experien