"When the coffee was passed the head waiter brought to him an assortment of cigars on a tray, some one guilder each, some five cents. De Ruyter pushed them away with a contemptuous wave of the hand, saying, 'There is nothing you have to my taste; I will smoke my own.' "The great moment had now arrived. He paid his bill, ordered a fresh candle, waited until the head waiter, whose guilder had made him all the more obsequious, had lighted it and stood waiting where he could see, and then slipped his hand into his inside pocket for the cigar. It was not there! Then he remembered that he had not taken it from the bed. "He ran all the way home. There lay the cigar on the blanket. The next instant it was on the floor and under his heel. "'Lie there, damn you!' he said, crushing it to pieces. 'You have spoiled my dinner!' * * * * * "You see, gentlemen, it was not the hunger of the empty stomach; it was a starved imagination that was ravenous like a wolf. Ah, cannot you feel for the poor fellow? All the week hungry, one great idea of the dignity of rank in his mind, and then to have his triumph spoiled, and under the eyes of the head waiter, too! And such beasts of waiters they are at home, with their eyes seeing everything and their tongues never still! My father, when he would tell the story, would tap his chair and say, 'Ah, poor devil! such a pity--such a pity he forgot it! It would have tasted so good to him!' That was a word of my father's--'He forgot it--he forgot it,' he would say, shaking his finger at us." "All to the credit of your father, Van Brunt," burst out Marny; "but if you want my candid opinion of your blue-blooded, busted baron, I think he was a selfish brute, without the first glimmer of what a gentleman should have done under such circumstances, and I leave it to everybody here to decide whether I'm right or wrong. What he ought to have done was to hunt around for some of his friends, order a dinner for two, hand his friend the cigar and take a cheap one from the waiter for himself. What you call 'fine eating' has nothing to do with either the stomach or with the imagination. Fine eating is an excuse for good fellowship; when you don't have that, it is a 'stalled ox' and the rest of it. What you want is to open with a laugh and eat straight through to that same kind of music. All the good dinners in the world were jolly dinners; all the poor ones were funeral gatherings, no matter how good the cooking. I'll give you an idea of what a good dinner ought to be. None of your selfish, solitary-confinement sort of a meal like this self-centred Dutchman's, but a rip-roaring, waistcoat-swelling, breath-catching, hilarious feast, which began with a hurrah, continued with every man singing psalms of thanksgiving over the dishes and the company, and ended with a tempest of good cheer and everybody loving everybody else twice as much for having come together."