They exhibited no great interest in society, though each commanded a
place there, but they would go to church or theater together, and they
were much addicted to luncheons. She would come down town at noon to
meet him, and then--what banquets! Sometimes they would visit the
restaurants where there were fine things, and he would seek to make of
her a gourmet. He taught her the beauties of the bobolink in his later
attractive form, the form he assumes when, after having been
transformed into a reed bird, he comes back on ice to the region where,
in the midsummer, he disported himself, and stirs the heart of the good
liver, as in June he did the heart of the poet. He taught her the
difference between Roquefort cheese, that green garden of toothsome
fungi, that crumbly, piquant apotheosis of the best that comes from
curd, and all other cheeses, and taught, too, the virtues of each in
its own way. She learned the adjuncts of black coffee and hard
crackers. She even learned to criticise a claret, and once, with
Harlson, she tested a _pousse cafe_, but only once. He didn't approve
of it, he said, for ladies. And, besides, a _pousse cafe_ was not of
merit in itself. It was but a thing spectacular.
And in the matter of made dishes from the man about town she acquired
much wisdom.
The man in his great happiness was buoyant and fantastic, and well it
was that the woman, too, possessed the sense of humor which makes the
world worth occupancy, and that the two could understand together. He
was but a foolish boy in this, his delicious period of probation.
And she was but a loving woman who had given her heart to him, who
understood him, and who, in a woman's way, was of his mood. It was an
idyl of the clever.
At the more modest restaurants were the lunches of these two the most
delightful. He would, somehow, find queer little places where all was
clean and the cooking good, but far away from the haunts of men, that
is, far away from the haunts of the men and women they knew, and there
the two would have great feasts. At one unpretending place he had one
day found pork and beans,--not the molasses-colored abomination
ordinarily sold in town, but the white beans, baked in a deep pan, with
the slashed piece of pork browned in the middle of the dish,--and this
place became a great resort for them. They would sit at a small table,
and have the beans brought on, and mustard of the sharpest and
shrewdest, and dishes such as formed a halo about the beans, which were
the central figure, and then would they eat, being healthy, and look
into each other's face, and riot in present happiness, having certain
brains and being in love. The very rudeness of it pleased him mightily.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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