And a very enjoyable dinner-party it was, altogether: a simple but carefully arranged menu, the dishes thoroughly well cooked—two or three foreign touches, maccaroni aux tomates, American-trimmed peaches with cream, and little fairy cakes—cat tongues—do you know them?—and roasted almonds in Spanish fashion, and as good claret Sauterne and sparkling Mosel (for I know a good glass of wine when I get it) as one need wish for.
The food-regenerator and his wife and the blonde "healer" had seats together, and were helped only to vegetables and fruits—the girl, indeed, taking only unbolted bread, of which an enormous supply in the shape of hard little cakes was placed before her, together with a large vegetable-dish full of stewed prunes; and the two mountains of bread and fruit had disappeared when the meal was ended—how many pounds I don't know, but then dinner is her sole meal in the twenty-four hours.
"Did you see that young woman's dinner?" burst out my liege that night when we were discussing our late experiences. "Disgusting! It ought to have been served in a trough! I looked every instant to see her fall from her chair and have to be carried out. If one is to gorge oneself like an anaconda once a day upon fruit and chopped straw in order to live to a good old age, I think we'll elect to be cut off in our youthful bloom."
But the talk at table was clever and gay, and thoroughly un-English in that it was general instead of being broken up into a dozen depressing sotto-voce dialogues. The "healer," indeed, was too busy eating to open her mouth much uselessly, and the white cat was too timid for speech. But her editor made amends. He talked for three; not ill, but with a flavor of bitterness, and not enough in the third person.
"Oh, women are the stronghold of superstition," he exclaimed apropos of some passage between himself and the American art-student—"fettered hard and fast by hoary prejudices," he went on with rather a confusion of metaphors, "else the world might move."
"But we bind you, upon a man's testimony, but by a single hair," answered his opponent: "why not burst so slight a shackle?"
"And you to talk of freedom!" he went on as if unhearing. "Why do you wear that emblem at your throat?" (A plain gold cross which came into bold relief against her black velvet bodice.)
"Possibly because I'm a Christian." She answered without change of voice, but stopping the conversation by addressing some one nearer her. But the little porcelain widow, with a pretty upward movement, like the flutter of a bird on her nest, caught at a floating thread, and said in her tiny flute voice.
"But, Mr. Ridley, if he is interested in symbolism, will remember that the cross is a very ancient symbol, typifying the active and passive forces in nature—good and evil, light and darkness. And is it not very curious how everywhere the sign is impressed on external nature—in the heavens, in crystals, in flowers, in a bird's flight? In the arts too."
"And the legends, fables, and touching or droll superstitions concerning it are endless," said the white-headed doctor beside me. "And yet I'm often struck with the comparative newness of what may be termed literature of the cross. This dwelling on apparition in so many forms of the Story of the Cross is quite modern, and I fancy that a Good Friday service, a following through the Three Hours' Agony with a colloquial soliloquy, if one may use such an expression, upon the Seven Last Words, would have seemed as novel to the early Christians as it does now to the Low Church portion of our beautifully consistent Establishment."