Belden began to read.
In spite of himself, Dick began to feel the fascination of Murger's recital of all those rollicking, roystering episodes in the Latin Quarter. He let the Omar fall idly into his lap, and gave himself up to listening to Belden's reading. The other men smoked and smiled. Dick's sense of humor told him that there was something quaint in the way Belden intentionally fed his own love for Bohemianism with another's description; none the less he admitted that there was no sham, dilettante Bohemianism about this place and the men present. It was not the Bohemianism of claw-hammer coats and high-priced champagne; of little suppers, after the theater, in a black and gold boudoir, where the women tasted some Welsh rarebit and declared that they were afraid it was "awfully Bohemian, don't you know!" It was the Bohemia that recked naught of others, but had as banner, "Do as you please," and as watchword "Don't care." It was the old philosophy of Epicurus brought to modern usage.
The good-humored account that. Henri Murger gave of so many picturesque light-love escapades, that had so much of pathos mingled with their unmorality, began to find in Dick a vein of sympathy. He felt that it was all very pleasant; all was charmingly put; it was interesting.
"There," Belden declared, as he finished reading the episode of the flowers that Musette watered every night, because she had promised to love while those blossoms lived, "I'm dry, that's what I am. I think it's about time we investigated. Come on into the kitchen, people. There's some coffee and cake and fruit. Shouldn't wonder if you could find a bottle or two of beer on the ice, too."
They trooped out, through a room and corridor, to the kitchen. There was a bare, deal table, a cooking range, a gas stove, a refrigerator and several doors leading to closets. Every man brought his own chair. A search was begun for cups, plates, knives and forks. Each man sat down where he pleased. The coffee that was made was hardly such as one gets at Tortoni's, but it was refreshing, nevertheless. The sound of corks drawing from beer-bottles, of knives rattling on plates, and of indiscriminate, lusty chatter filled the place. Belden was the master-spirit. He saw that everyone helped himself; he chaffed and he laughed; he looked after the provender and the cigars. The infection of all this jollity touched Dick; he began to say to himself that to worry himself "with conscientious scruples just because it was on a Sunday instead of a Monday that all this happened, was to be something of a prig." And he had always had a decided aversion to being that particular sort of nuisance. He resigned himself completely to the spirit of the time and place.
McRoy broke into the babel of talk with a plaintive, "Everybody listen for about a minute, will you? I want to ask Belden a solemn question: Belden, have you finished that copy of 'Old-World Idyls' that you were going to illustrate for me in pen-and-ink, on the margins?"
Belden smiled. "Why, to tell you the truth, old man—" he began, but the other interrupted him with, "There! publicly branded! Belden, you're the awfulest breaker of oaths that ever was let live. You've had the book six months, and I'll bet you've never drawn a stroke on it!"
"The mistake you made," put in Stanley, "was to believe that he ever would do the thing. He once made a promise of that sort to me, but that was so long ago that I think I'm another person now."
"If the theory of evolution is correct," said Vanstruther, "your late lamented self must have been and abominably corrupt person."
Stanley sighed, "Perhaps so. I am trying, you know, day by day, to approach the sublime pinnacle on which you, my dear Van, tower above the rest of mankind. However—" he reached his arm out over the table—"Any beer left over there?"