‘How soon they know you are here!’ said Nadine Napraxine, as he spoke of the invitation to her. ‘You will go, of course; you cannot have any engagements?’
‘Will you be there?’
‘I do not know; yes, perhaps. I never make up my mind until the last hour. People say it is cruel when they have dinners; it leaves a place blank; but how can you be sure what you wish to do until the moment comes? I detest dinners. When we have really become civilised we shall each of us eat in solitude, or, at the least, each behind his own screen. Why should one of the unloveliest of the operations of nature be performed in public? The flowers, and the plate, and the footmen cannot really embellish it; indeed, they only make it the more grotesque.’
‘How droll you are, Nadine!’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘You have certainly a monopoly of singular ideas.’
‘I wish my ideas were general,’ answered the Princess. ‘When the world has really refined itself it will look on our eating in society as we look now on savages eating with their fingers. Some of our friends cannot even have a little love affair but they must go and eat prawns, and quails, and petits fours together in a café; and if a hero comes home from a war anywhere his countrymen at once make him eat and drink in public by way of showing their respect for him. The whole thing is absurd. The only creature that is not offensive when it eats is a bird. Just one little dive in a rose, or under a vine-leaf, and it has breakfasted. But we!——’
‘When a very pretty woman eats a strawberry, the bird is not very much her superior,’ murmured Melville.
‘Reverend father,’ said the Princess, ‘you have no business to know whether one is pretty or not. Fruit, perhaps, does keep something of the golden age about it; but our dinners!—were I a man I would never see the woman I admired taking her share of diseased livers, tortured fish, slaughtered songsters. They are fond of writing nowadays about a higher humanity which will succeed to ours; but my idea of it would be that it should be fed like Fénelon’s islanders by only breathing sweet odours. That would be even better than the bird’s dip in the rose.’
‘Then you will not go to Millo?’ persisted Othmar.
‘Who knows what one may do in twenty-four hours?’