It really was very jolly. I don't believe that we could have been any jollier had there been ten courses, winding up with a _parfait au café_ and a _demi-tasse_. Instead of these, we finished our dinner with the remainder of the pickles and a nice glass of cool water. Letitia drank my health and I drank hers. We clinked glasses in the continental fashion. Then we waited, for we couldn't dispossess our minds of the belief that there was something to follow. I wouldn't admit to Letitia that I felt a trifle--er--incomplete; while Letitia certainly made no such confession. Yet there was a something lacking--an indescribable finishing touch. The delicatessen dinner undoubtedly lacked a finishing touch. It was all beginning. The appearance of the table after dinner was even more eccentric than we had found it at first sight. The empty wooden dishes, the paper that had held the Gruyère, and the two mere plates, had no suggestion of rollicking dissipation. Nor did they even suggest an overweening domesticity. Letitia, at last, rose from the table and I did the same. I advanced to the door and opened it for her, and she passed into the drawing-room, leaving me alone to enjoy a whiff or two of my cigarette. We determined to keep up the etiquette of refined life in its every ramification. The door of the bathroom stood wide open and rather spoiled the illusion. But Letitia did not notice it. I saw her pass down the hall like a queen, her head in the air, and her pink silk dress _froufrou_-ing deliciously. I threw myself back in an arm-chair, and sighed luxuriously. Then, before joining Letitia, I donned my smoking-jacket, and felt exquisitely at home. This was comfort, such as the maddened bachelor, in his infuriated solitude, can scarcely imagine. The petty cares of life took unto themselves wings and fled. Letitia, in the drawing-room, awaited me anxiously. We were both inclined to look upon the prescribed separation of the sexes after dinner as a relic of barbarism. But it was a polite relic, and we had no intention of shirking it. She looked up from her Ovid as I entered, and then, rising, she threw her arms around me and kissed me. It was eight o'clock, and we had a long evening before us. I had promised myself a holiday from my _Lives of Great Men_ to-night. Letitia had guaranteed entertainment, and this took the form of reading a translation of Ovid, aloud. She would have preferred to entertain me in the original, but excellent Latin scholar though I was, I clamored for a translation. With one's wife, a man can be perfectly frank. Ovid, in the original, was a trifle--heavy.