The food came, and Victor Budge served it. “I’m a realist,” he said. “When I’m hungry, I know it. I don’t pretend that I like olives because they remind me of the Mediterranean: grub is grub—you need it, and you’ve got to have it. And if you take life simply and realistically, it’s not hard to get all you want of it. What’s the use of starving in a garret? You and I know what life is like, and that it’s a pretty good old game if you play it like everybody else does. Be like other folks! Why should an artist feel that he has to be so damn refined and superior? What’s good enough for ordinary people is good enough for me. I don’t believe in this artistic belly-aching-around about how coarse and vulgar life is. Take things as you find ’em, and don’t bawl for the moon. That’s what I say.” In spite of the way Victor Budge put this philosophy—its boisterousness somehow smacked of an inner lack of conviction, as though he were arguing to convince himself—yet there seemed to be sound sense in it. That, after all, was what Felix himself was trying to do—be like other people.... Yes, Victor Budge was right. “Have some more red ink? Plenty more in George’s cellar.—And girls, for instance. Now I don’t have any use at all for this—this eternal poetizing about them! What’s a girl, after all? The same kind of critter we are! I don’t find ’em mysterious—and I don’t go ’round grouching about ’em, either. Girls and me have always got along perfectly well. Because I don’t expect them to be something else than what they are—Helen of Troy and the Blessed Damozel and all that sort of rot. I don’t go up to them asking, ‘Are you my long-lost ideal?’ They don’t want to be anybody’s long-lost ideal. They want to be taken for what they are! Isn’t it so?” “I don’t know,” said Felix, humbly.... Yes, doubtless there was something unrealistic in his attitude toward girls—something that he must get over.... “I’m afraid I don’t know very much about girls. You may be right.” “Of course I’m right,” affirmed Victor Budge. “It stands to reason that there isn’t just one girl in all the world for you or me.” Which, while perhaps not a logical sequitur to Victor Budge’s previous remarks, was precisely what Felix had been trying to convince himself of.... “That,” said Victor Budge, “that sort of silly nonsense in people’s heads is what makes them go around making themselves miserable, because they haven’t yet found the one and only. I guess if a man was cast away on a desert island with a girl, he’d find she was his one and only quick enough! Of course, if you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life with her, you’ll want somebody who knows what you’re talking about, and all that sort of thing! But when all you want is an evening’s good time, what difference does it make to you whether she’s read the latest book by Henry James? There are some damn fine girls that couldn’t tell Henry James from Jesse James, and you darn well know it!”