A Top-Floor Idyl

E-text prepared by Darleen Dove, Roger Frank, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

I smiled at my friend Gordon, the distinguished painter, lifting up my glass and taking a sip of the table d'hôte claret, which the Widow Camus supplies with her famed sixty-five cent repast. It is, I must acknowledge, a somewhat turbid beverage, faintly harsh to the palate, and yet it may serve as a begetter of pleasant illusions. While drinking it, I can close my eyes, being of an imaginative nature, and permit its flavor to bring back memories of ever-blessed tonnelles by the Seine, redolent of fried gudgeons and mirific omelettes, and felicitous with gay laughter.
Well, you old stick-in-the-mud, said my companion, what are you looking so disgruntled about? I was under the impression that this feast was to be a merry-making to celebrate your fortieth birthday. Something like a grin just now passed over your otherwise uninteresting features, but it was at once succeeded by the mournful look that may well follow, but should not be permitted to accompany, riotous living.
At this I smiled again.
Just a moment's wool-gathering, my dear fellow, I answered. I was thinking of our old feasts, and then I began to wonder whether the tune played by that consumptive-looking young man at the piano might be a wild requiem to solemnize that burial of two-score years, or a song of triumphant achievement.
I think it's what they call a fox-trot, remarked Gordon, doubtfully. Your many sere and yellow years have brought you to a period in the world's history when the joy of the would-be young lies chiefly in wild contortion to the rhythm of barbaric tunes. I see that they are getting ready to clear away some of the tables and, since we are untrained in such new arts and graces, they will gradually push us away towards the doors. The bottle, I notice, is nearly half empty, which proves our entire sobriety; had it been Pommard , we should have paid more respectful attention to it. Give me a light, and let us make tracks.