'What you saw me doing was not dining,' said Papa. 'Not dining?' Papa waved his arms round oddly and suddenly. 'Grass--grass,' he cried with a singular impatience. 'Grass?' I echoed, still more amazed. 'Books of an enduring nature, works of any monumentalness, cannot, never were, and shall not be raised on a foundation of grass,' said Papa, his face quite red. 'I can't think what you mean,' said I. 'Where is there any grass?' 'Here,' said Papa, quickly clasping his hands over that portion of him that we boldly talk about and call _Magen_, and you allude to sideways, by a variety of devious expressions. 'I have been fed today,' he said, looking at me quite severely, 'on a diet appropriate only to the mountain goat, and probably only appropriate to him because he can procure nothing better.' 'Why, you had a lentil soup--proved scientifically to contain all that is needed--' 'I congratulate the lentil soup. I envy it. I wish I too contained all that is needed. But here'--he clasped his hands again--'there is nothing.' 'Yes there is. There is cabbage.' 'Pooh,' said Papa. 'Green stuff. Herbage.' 'Herbage?' 'And scanty herbage, too--appropriate, I suppose, to the mountainous region in which we now find ourselves.' 'Papa, don't you want to be a vegetarian?' 'I want my coffee,' said Papa. 'What, now?' 'And why not now, Rose-Marie? Is there anything more rational than to eat when one is hungry? Let there, pray, be much--very much--bread-and- butter with it.' 'But, Papa, we weren't going to have coffee any more. Didn't you agree that we would give up stimulants?' Papa looked at me defiantly. 'I did,' he said. 'Well, coffee is one.' 'It is our only one.' 'You said you would give it up.' 'I said gradually. To do so today would not be doing so gradually. Nothing is good that is not done gradually.' 'But one must begin.' 'One must begin gradually.' 'You were delighted with Shelley.' 'It was after dinner.' 'You were quite convinced.' 'I was not hungry.' 'You know he is all for pure water.' 'He is all for many things that seem admirable to those who have lately dined.' 'You know he says that if the populace of Paris at the time of the Revolution had drunk at the pure source of the Seine--' 'There is no pure source of the Seine within reach of the populace of Paris. There would only be cats. Dead cats. And cats interspersed, no doubt, with a variety of objects of the nature of portions of crockery and empty tins.' 'But he says pure source.' 'Then he says pure nonsense.' 'He says if they had done that and satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature--' 'Ever-furnished table? Holy Heaven--the good, the excellent young man.' '--they would never have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription list of Robespierre.' 'Rose-Marie, today I care not what this young man says.' 'He says--look, I've got the book in my pocket--' 'I will not look.'