Throughout the dinner their entire absorption in each other was all but unbroken. Percival never could remember who had sat at his left; and Miss Milbrey's right-hand neighbour saw more than the winning line of her profile but twice. Percival began-- "Do you know, I've never been able to classify you at all. I never could tell how to take you." "I'll tell you a secret, Mr. Bines; I think I'm not to be taken at all. I've begun to suspect that I'm like one of those words that haven't any rhyme--like 'orange' and 'month,' you know." "But you find poetry in life? I do." "Plenty of verse--not much poetry." "How would you order life now, if the little old wishing-lady came to your door and knocked?" And they plunged forthwith, buoyed by youth's divine effrontery, into mysteries that have vexed diners, not less than hermit sages, since "the fog of old time" first obscured truth. Of life and death--the ugliness of life, and the beauty of death-- "... even as death might smile, Petting the plumes of some surprised soul," quoted the girl. Of loving and hating, they talked; of trying and failing--of the implacable urge under which men must strive in the face of certain defeat--of the probability that men are purposely born fools, since, if they were born wise they would refuse to strive; whereupon life and death would merge, and naught would prevail but a vast indifference. In fact, they were very deep, and affected to consider these grave matters seriously. They affected that they never habitually thought of lesser concerns. And they had the air of listening to each other as if they were weighing the words judicially, and were quite above any mere sensuous considerations of personality. Once they emerged long enough to hear the hostess speaking, as it were of yesterday, of a day when the new "German cotillion" was introduced, to make a sensation in New York; of a time when the best ballrooms were heated with wood stoves and lighted with lamps; and of a later but apparently still remote time when the Assemblies were "really, quite the smartest function of the season." In another pause, they caught the kernel of a story being told by Uncle Peter: