take up the theme.

"Well, Mistress Wisdom!" he saluted her, smiling, and waving his hand.
"It is a good and wholesome thing for the young to witness the
discomfiture of the wicked. Your uncle retreats with flying colours. He
made, to be sure, a slender dinner, but that's his daily habit. If you
have tears to shed, shed them for me. I have made none at all."

From points of interrogation, Annunziata's eyes changed to abysses of
wonder, and, big as they were, seemed to grow measurably bigger.

"You have made no dinner?" she protested, in that strangely deep voice
of hers, with its effect of immense solemnity.

"No, poor dear," said John, with pathos, "no, I have made no dinner."

"But you have eaten a great deal," exclaimed Annunziata, frowning,
nonplussed. "And you are still eating."

"Quite so," responded John, "though I think it's perhaps the merest
trifle unhandsome of you to fling it in my face. I have eaten a great
deal, and I am still eating. That is what I come to table for. In an
orderly life like mine there is a place for everything. I come to table
to eat, just as I go to bed to sleep and to church to say my prayers.
Would you have me sleep at table, eat in church, and say my prayers in
bed? Eating, however, has nothing to do with the case. I spoke of
dining--I said I had not dined. Now you shall be the judge. The question
is, can a Christian man dine twice on the same day? Answer me that."

"Oh, no," answered Annunziata, her pale face very sober, and she
lengthened out her vowels in deprecation of the idea. "At least, it
would be gluttony if he did."

"There you are," cried John. "And gluttony is not the undeadliest of the
Seven Deadly Sins. So, then, unless you would have me guilty of the
deadly sin of gluttony, you must agree that I have not dined. For I am
going to dine this evening. I am going to dine at the Hotel Victoria at
Roccadoro. I am going to dine with a lady. I am going to dine in all the
pomp and circumstance of my dress-suit, with a white tie and pumps. And
you yourself have said it, a Christian man may not, without guilt of
gluttony, dine twice on the same day. Therefore it is the height of
uncharitableness, it's a deliberate imputation of sin, to contend that I
have dined already."

Annunziata followed his reasoning thoughtfully, and then gravely set him
right.

"No," she said, with a drop of the eyelids and a quick little shake of
the head, "you do not understand. I will explain."