"Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all. Pity about the Dardanelles. Great pity, but we had no luck. They are making a great fuss here over this coming Austrian attack upon Serbia. Don't believe in it. Sha'n't believe in it until it happens. But it won't happen, and if it does happen--waiter, where's that champagne?--if it does happen, it won't alter the course of the war. Not a bit of it. I'm an optimist. And in times like these I consider that optimism is of as much use to my country at my age as a rifle would have been if I were a younger man. Pessimism in times like these is a poison." "But isn't optimism apt to be an intoxicant?" Sylvia suggested. She felt inclined to impress upon Mr. Porter the difference between facing misfortune with money and without it, and she told him a few of her adventures in the past year, winding up with an account of the behavior of the proprietor of this very hotel. "You don't mean to say old Andrescu refused to serve you with anything to eat?" The notion seemed to shake Mr. Porter to the depths of his being. "Why, I never heard anything like it! Waiter, go and tell M. Andrescu to come and speak to me at once. I shall give him a piece of my mind." The jovial curves of his face had all hardened: his bright little eyes were like steel: even the dimple in his chin had disappeared in the contraction of his mouth. When Andrescu came in, he began to abuse him in rapid Rumanian, while his complexion turned from pink to crimson, and from crimson in waves of color to a uniform purple. In the end he stopped talking for a moment, and the proprietor begged Sylvia's intercession. "That's the way to deal with rascally hotelkeepers," said Mr. Porter, fanning himself with a red-and-yellow bandana handkerchief and drinking two glasses of champagne. "What annoyed me most of all," he added, "was that his behavior should have made me miss the chance of asking another jolly little English girl to dinner. Too bad!" Sylvia had not told him more than the bare outlines of the story; she had not confided in him about Florilor or the sale of her bag, or the fact that she had lost Queenie forever. Her tale could have seemed not much more than a tale of temporary inconvenience, and she was therefore only amused when Mr. Porter deduced from it as the most important result his own failure to entertain Queenie. After dinner she and her host sat talking for a while, or rather she sat listening to his narratives of holidays spent in England, which evidently appealed to him as a much more vital part of his career than his success in the Rumanian oil-fields. When, about eleven o'clock, she got up to take her leave and go to bed, he expressed his profound dismay at the notion of thus breaking up a jolly evening.