"I never thought of that," she said. Then, with the conscientious resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any risk the truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! I _have_. But I never supposed you would ask me." She stared at him, and she was aware she was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to close it with he closed it for her. XIV A FEAST OF REASON Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town, and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend the night before, and, "Well, thank goodness," she said, "there is an end to that sort of thing for _one_ while." "An end to _that_ thing," he partially assented, "but not that _sort_ of thing." "What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully. "I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining." "Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be nobody there for a while--not for a whole month, nearly." "They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left off here." "We women!" she protested. "Yes, you--you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?" "It's because we can't get you to the lunches." "In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches." "We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the darkness on those bad roads." "I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you." "No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all going on again." They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter; that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received, it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at home, and they never dine alone abroad--of course not! I wonder they can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entrée, and the roast and salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and cigars--how I hate it all!" Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment of bacon on her plate. "And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm about the first dinner of autumn, after you've got back."