hotel such as this
there is an outward show of reverence, but it is sheer hypocrisy; of
real piety there is none, a sham attempt to observe the sacred rites
without knowing how. I admit I don't know either. From me the divine
afflatus has been withheld. But elsewhere I have been conscious of the
presence. Once or twice I was blessed. Here, though, in default of
shrines there should be chairs. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, should
establish a few. When I was in college I was taught everything that it
is easiest to forget. If the youth of the land were instructed in
gastronomy we would all be wiser and better. Chairs on gastronomy, that
is what we need!"

Cassy laughed. "Why not tables?"

Paliser laughed with her. The laughter was a bond. It joined them
however tenuously. It was what he had been driving at. Accustomed to
easy successes, Cassy's atmosphere, with its flavour of standoffishness
and indifference, appealed to this man, who had supped on the facile and
who wanted the difficult. Cassy, he could have sworn, would supply it
and, if he had, he would have sworn very truly.

Meanwhile the muskrat had gone. Dishes less false but equally fair had
followed. Now, with the air of a conjurer, the waiter just showed them
an entremets which he hastened to serve. It was a soufflee.

At it, Cassy, just showing the point of her strawberry tongue, exclaimed
without rancour: "Ma Tamby has thrown us over."

Paliser lit a cigarette. "She may be singing in the private room."

Cassy laughed again. "Yes. 'Una voce poco fa!' That would be just the
thing--wouldn't it?--to sing privately in private."

Paliser answered, though what, she did not hear. The orchestra drowned
it and for a moment she considered him, conscious that he was less
objectionable than he had seemed, yet entirely unconscious that such
objection as she had experienced was due to his extreme good-looks,
which in a man are always objectionable to a woman when she herself is
handsome, for they make him resemble her and, in so doing, constitute an
encroachment on her prerogatives, which, in itself, is an affront.

Cassy, ignorant of the psychology of it, equally unaware that
familiarity which may breed contempt can also dissolve dislike, and
feeling merely a lessening of her instinctive hostility, told herself
that he was perhaps not as cocky as he looked and drank of the glass
before her.

The Clos de Vougeot which, to the educated palate, is art, literature
and song