"What, another little Englishwoman in Avereshti? By George! what a pity I didn't turn up yesterday! I sha'n't forgive myself. Come along, waiter. Hurry up with that champagne. Fancy! Another jolly little Englishwoman and I missed her. Too bad!"
There was irony in meeting upon the vigil of her return to England this Englishman redolent of the Monico. Sylvia had spent so much of her time intimately with people at the other pole of pleasure that she had forgotten how to talk to this type and could only respond with monosyllables to his boisterous assaults upon the present. He was so much like a fine afternoon in London that she sunned herself, as it were, in his effluence, and let her senses occupy themselves with the noise of the traffic, as if she had suddenly been transplanted to the Strand and was finding the experience immediately on top of Avereshti pleasant, but rather bewildering. And now he was talking about the war.
"Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all. Pity about the Dardanelles. Great pity, but we had no luck. They are making a great fuss here over this coming Austrian attack upon Serbia. Don't believe in it. Sha'n't believe in it until it happens. But it won't happen, and if it does happen—waiter, where's that champagne?—if it does happen, it won't alter the course of the war. Not a bit of it. I'm an optimist. And in times like these I consider that optimism is of as much use to my country at my age as a rifle would have been if I were a younger man. Pessimism in times like these is a poison."
"But isn't optimism apt to be an intoxicant?" Sylvia suggested.
She felt inclined to impress upon Mr. Porter the difference between facing misfortune with money and without it, and she told him a few of her adventures in the past year, winding up with an account of the behavior of the proprietor of this very hotel.
"You don't mean to say old Andrescu refused to serve you with anything to eat?"
The notion seemed to shake Mr. Porter to the depths of his being.
"Why, I never heard anything like it! Waiter, go and tell M. Andrescu to come and speak to me at once. I shall give him a piece of my mind."
The jovial curves of his face had all hardened: his bright little eyes were like steel: even the dimple in his chin had disappeared in the contraction of his mouth. When Andrescu came in, he began to abuse him in rapid Rumanian, while his complexion turned from pink to crimson, and from crimson in waves of color to a uniform purple. In the end he stopped talking for a moment, and the proprietor begged Sylvia's intercession.
"That's the way to deal with rascally hotelkeepers," said Mr. Porter, fanning himself with a red-and-yellow bandana handkerchief and drinking two glasses of champagne.