Emphatically, David did not. All he could make of this party business was that it was a kind of game. The nation’s money-boxes had highly veneered and colored surfaces. The Republican was more polished, the Democratic had more color. If one said, “I believe in the blue and gold design” did one mean, “I get into the coffers by the side that is painted blue and gold?” David had these little speculations and was properly ashamed of them. He knew they were the sure consequence of his being unable to understand. When he dined alone he was least troubled. There was a Hungarian restaurant he particularly liked because of the delicious thick soups and the beer and the caressing music. He went there often and ate perhaps more than he should, and sat about drinking his beer very soberly and slowly, puffing at the superb English pipe Cornelia had given him for his birthday. It had an amber stem and the one flaw in the delight of smoking was that he needed to be careful not to bite it through. On this evening, as usual, he was not alone at his table. At this sort of place, where a sumptuous meal cost forty cents, one could expect no more than one’s own seat at the board. Mostly, men came and bowed stiffly for permission to sit down and were no sooner seated than they forgot him altogether in their torrents of strange words. Now came a man with his lady. David listened to them through the meal with an interest that might conceivably have flagged had he been able to understand the Magyar tongue. But the complete veil over their words made watching their faces and their gestures, noting the gait of their voices, a sort of game. It sharpened their personalities as these revealed them, and as the community of language must have dulled them. David took delight trying to break up the endless turgid flow into words and sentences. Mostly, he had delight in watching the woman.