"What annoyed me most of all," he added, "was that his behavior should have made me miss the chance of asking another jolly little English girl to dinner. Too bad!"
Sylvia had not told him more than the bare outlines of the story; she had not confided in him about Florilor or the sale of her bag, or the fact that she had lost Queenie forever. Her tale could have seemed not much more than a tale of temporary inconvenience, and she was therefore only amused when Mr. Porter deduced from it as the most important result his own failure to entertain Queenie.
After dinner she and her host sat talking for a while, or rather she sat listening to his narratives of holidays spent in England, which evidently appealed to him as a much more vital part of his career than his success in the Rumanian oil-fields. When, about eleven o'clock, she got up to take her leave and go to bed, he expressed his profound dismay at the notion of thus breaking up a jolly evening.
"Tell you what we'll do," he announced. "We'll make a night of it. We will, by George! we will! A night of it. We'll have half a dozen bottles put on ice and take them up to my room. I can talk all night on champagne. Now don't say no. It's a patriotic duty. By George! it's a patriotic duty when two English people meet in a God-forsaken place like this; it's a patriotic duty to make a night of it. Eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die."
Sylvia was feeling weary enough, but the fatuous talk had cheered her by its sheer inanity, and the thought of going to bed in that haunted room—her will was strong, but the memory of what she had endured for Queenie was not entirely quenched—and of perhaps not being able to sleep was too dismal. She might just as well help this amiable old buffoon's illusion that champagne was the elixir of eternal life and that pleasure was nothing but laughing loudly enough.
"All right," said Sylvia. "But I'd rather we made the night of it in my room. I'll get into a wrapper and make myself comfortable, and when dawn breaks I can tumble into bed."
Mr. Porter hesitated a moment. "Right you are, my dear girl. Of course. Waiter! Where's the ruffian hidden himself?"
"I'll leave you to make the arrangements. I shall be ready in about a quarter of an hour," Sylvia said.
She left him and went up-stairs.
"I believe the silly old fool thought I was making overtures to him when I suggested we should make merry in my room," she laughed to herself. "Oh dear, it shows how much one can tell and how little of oneself need be revealed in the telling of it. Stupid old ass! But rather pleasant in a way. He's like finding an old Christmas number of the Graphic—colored heartiness, conventional mirth, reality mercifully absent, and O mihi prœteritos printed in Gothic capitals on the cover. I suppose these pre-war figures still abound in England. And I'm not sure he isn't right in believing that his outlook on life is worth preserving as long as possible. Timbered houses, crusted port, and Dickens are nearer to fairyland than anything else that's left nowadays. To what old age will this blackened, mutilated, and agonized generation grow? Efficiency and progress have not spared the monuments of bygone art except to imprison them in libraries, museums, and iron railings. Will it spare the Englishman? Or will the generations of a century hence read of him only, and murmur, 'This was a Man'? Will they praise him as the last and noblest individual, turning with repulsion and remorse from the sight of themselves and their fellows, the product of the triumphant herd eternally sowing where it does not reap? Night thoughts of the young on perceiving a relic of insular grandeur in an exceptionally fine state of preservation—preserved in oil! And here he comes to interrupt my sad soliloquy."