“I am inclined to think you are right,” said I, “if only you will give the term dinner an inclusive significance, and not ascribe the whole miracle to the cooking.”
“The cooking has much to do with it, I am convinced,” persisted the Sphinx, looking more radiantly spiritual than I ever saw her look before. “It is so good that its part in the process passes to some extent unnoticed—though I trust the excellence of these mushrooms is not lost upon you. Were the chef to be changed for the worse, I’m not so sure you would find that harmony you speak of.”
“Then I have owed more to the chef than I have ever realised,” said I, raising my glass to her, and making that salute to her eyes which, however gay our mood, has always a curiously grave, almost sacramental, quality. “Still,” I continued presently, “I am not entirely convinced. Your argument has a negative force, I admit. Bad cooking, like any other extraneous annoyance, might, of course, distract us a little, and so superficially interrupt our harmony; but it is one thing to admit that, and another to say that it follows because bad cooking might destroy our harmony, good cooking therefore makes it. No, I am convinced that the miracle comes of a conflux of pleasant influences, good food and wine being amongst them, which never entirely meet together except at the dinner-table. First of all, the day is over. Its work is behind us. Its anxiety is locked up for the day. We meet the good hour in an attitude of gayety, and we meet it in an atmosphere of other gay people who have come to meet it in the same spirit. Then we meet it refreshed by the lustration of the evening toilet, and arrayed with regard to the pleasure of the eyes we specially aim to please....”
“Are they pleased to-night?” interrupted the Sphinx.
“Are they?” I rejoined. Then I continued my grave discourse: “As I said, we are all free and gay and beautiful and our faces set on pleasure. Then there is the music, the scarce-noted scents and the delicate shapes and colours of flowers, the prismatic glitter of glass, and the exhilarating snowiness of the table-linen....”
“Dave’s beaming smile,” added the Sphinx, referring to our waiter.
“Yes, calling up immediately all the happy dinners we have had at his table. If we were to meet him elsewhere in years to come, how his face would flash these evenings back to us! I believe I could count up the times we have been here by the wrinkles of kindness on his face.”
“I wonder if he really cares about us,” said the Sphinx, wistfully watching Dave as he expertly dismembered a roast duck at a side table. Presently the excellence of the duck turned her thoughts back again to our argument.
“Say what you will, with your conflux of pleasant influences,” she resumed, “roast duck is the real explanation.”
“Who would take you for such a materialist,” said I, “to look at you there, so radiantly delicate, so shiningly spirituelle?—”