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 spoo