"I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn't go to the American and English houses where they weren't sure of supper. They didn't give supper at the Italian houses because they couldn't afford it."
"I know that. I believe they do, now. But—
'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'
and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now. It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed—the sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper."
"I wonder," Lindora said, "whether the same sort of thing goes on at evening parties still—it's so long since I've been at one. It was awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating vis-à-vis with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn't much better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling, with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws champing as you looked up at them from below!"
"Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and trying to smile and look spirituelle between the shots."
Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on the back of her hand in the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. "Yes," she said, "awful, awful! Why should people want to flock together when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival of the primitive hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it with those who had nothing?"
"Possibly," Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary deference, or show of it. "But the people who mostly meet to feed together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the courses."
"Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of hospitality."
"Well, I don't know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing how funny the feeders all look."