"Oh, but there's no reason," said Trafford, "why you shouldn't take a lot of _hors-d'oeuvre_. Three or four sardines, and potato salad and a big piece of smoked salmon, and some of that Norwegian herring, and so on, and keep the olives by you to pick at. It's a beginning." "It's--it's immoral," said Marjorie, "that's what I feel. If one needs a whet to eat, one shouldn't eat. The proper beginning of a dinner is soup--good, hot, _rich_ soup. Thick soup--with things in it, vegetables and meat and things. Bits of oxtail." "Not peas." "No, not peas. Pea-soup is tiresome. I never knew anything one tired of so soon. I wish we hadn't relied on it so much." "Thick soup's all very well," said Trafford, "but how about that clear stuff they give you in the little pavement restaurants in Paris. You know--_Croûte-au-pot_, with lovely great crusts and big leeks and lettuce leaves and so on! Tremendous aroma of onions, and beautiful little beads of fat! And being a clear soup, you see what there is. That's--interesting. Twenty-five centimes, Marjorie. Lord! I'd give a guinea a plate for it. I'd give five pounds for one of those jolly white-metal tureens full--you know, _full_, with little drops all over the outside of it, and the ladle sticking out under the lid." "Have you ever tasted turtle soup?" "Rather. They give it you in the City. The fat's--ripping. But they're rather precious with it, you know. For my own part, I don't think soup should be _doled_ out. I always liked the soup we used to get at the Harts'; but then they never give you enough, you know--not nearly enough." "About a tablespoonful," said Marjorie. "It's mocking an appetite." "Still there's things to follow," said Trafford.... They discussed the proper order of a dinner very carefully. They decided that sorbets and ices were not only unwholesome, but nasty. "In London," said Trafford, "one's taste gets--vitiated."... They weighed the merits of French cookery, modern international cookery, and produced alternatives. Trafford became very eloquent about old English food. "Dinners," said Trafford, "should be feasting, not the mere satisfaction of a necessity. There should be--_amplitude_. I remember a recipe for a pie; I think it was in one of those books that man Lucas used to compile. If I remember rightly, it began with: 'Take a swine and hew it into gobbets.' Gobbets! That's something like a beginning. It was a big pie with tiers and tiers of things, and it kept it up all the way in that key.... And then what could be better than prime British-fed roast beef, reddish, just a shade on the side of underdone, and not too finely cut. Mutton can't touch it." "Beef is the best," she said.