"Oh, yes," she assented; "it's like a part of our lost youth. We think all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away beaming." "But when it keeps on and there's more and more of our lost youth, till it comes to being the whole--" "Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes it so detestable as the winter goes on." "All customs are detestable, the best of them," he suggested, "and I should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and glass, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on these, or even on the dishes of the dinner as they come successively on, it would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!" "Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young ones--I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of their faces with spoons and forks--" "Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it's a horror! A veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle. Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't serve him perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs--" "Don't, Florindo! It _is_ awful." "Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending to overweight and bulking above her plate--" "Yes, yes! That's dreadful, too. But when people are young--" "Oh, when people are young!" He said this in despair. Then he went on in an audible muse. "When people are young they are not only in their own youth; they are in the youth of the world, the race. They dine, but they don't think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think--" he broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, "they think of themselves. And they don't think of how they are looking."