ught to come in," said Fulkerson. "Before the soup!"

They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of drinking champagne out
of tumblers every day, as men like to do. Dryfoos listened uneasily; he
did not quite understand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespeare
was, well enough; Conrad's face expressed a gentle deprecation of joking
on such a subject, but he said nothing.

The talk ran on briskly through the dinner. The young men tossed the
ball back and forth; they made some wild shots, but they kept it going,
and they laughed when they were hit. The wine loosed Colonel Woodburn's
tongue; he became very companionable with the young fellows; with
the feeling that a literary dinner ought to have a didactic scope, he
praised Scott and Addison as the only authors fit to form the minds of
gentlemen.

Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the name of Flaubert as a
master of style. "Style, you know," he added, "is the man."

"Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir," the colonel assented; he
wondered who Flaubert was.

Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he said these were the
masters. He recited some lurid verses from Baudelaire; Lindau pronounced
them a disgrace to human nature, and gave a passage from Victor Hugo
on Louis Napoleon, with his heavy German accent, and then he quoted
Schiller. "Ach, boat that is a peaudifool! Not zo?" he demanded of
March.

"Yes, beautiful; but, of course, you know I think there's nobody like
Heine!"

Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed, showing a want of
teeth under his mustache. He put his hand on March's back. "This poy--he
was a poy den--wars so gracy to pekin reading Heine that he gommence
with the tictionary bevore he knows any Grammar, and ve bick it out vort
by vort togeder."

"He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, Lindau?" asked Fulkerson,
burlesquing the old man's accent, with an impudent wink that made Lindau
himself laugh. "But in the dark ages, I mean, there in Indianapolis.
Just how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?" Fulkerson saw
the restiveness in Dryfoos's eye at the purely literary course the talk
had taken; he had intended it to lead up that way to business, to 'Every
Other Week;' but he saw that it was leaving Dryfoos too far out, and he
wished to get it on the personal ground, where everybody is at home.

"Ledt me zee," mused Lindau. "Wass it in fifty-nine or zixty, Passil?
Idt wass a year or dwo pefore t