'I was dining out last night, and we were talking about you,' she began a few seconds later.
Women! Wine! Wealth! Joy! Life itself! He was swept off his feet by a sudden and tremendous impulse.
'I wish,' he blurted out, interrupting her—'I wish you'd come and dine with me some night, at a restaurant.'
'Oh!' she exclaimed, 'I should love it.'
'And we might go somewhere afterwards.' He was certainly capable of sublime conceptions.
And she exclaimed again: 'I should love it!' The naïve and innocent candour of her bliss appealed to him with extraordinary force.
In a moment or so he had regained his self-control, and he managed to tell her in a fairly usual tone that he would write and suggest an evening.
He parted from her in a whirl of variegated ecstasies. 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' he remarked to the street. What he meant was that, after more than a month's excogitation, he had absolutely failed to get any single shred of a theme for the successor to Love in Babylon—that successor out of which a mere couple of thousand pounds was to be made; and that he didn't care.