"Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be nobody there for a while—not for a whole month, nearly."
"They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left off here."
"We women!" she protested.
"Yes, you—you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?"
"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."
"In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches."
"We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the darkness on those bad roads."
"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you."
"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all going on again."
They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter; that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received, it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at home, and they never dine alone abroad—of course not! I wonder they can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entrée, and the roast and salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and cigars—how I hate it all!"