What this Gargantuan repast cost I do not know, for the designer of the feast said that the bill was to be sent to him.
I think that a "kosher" dinner, if this is a fair specimen, is a succession of admirably cooked dishes. But an ordinary man should be allowed a week in which to eat it.
La Princesse Lointaine was passing through town on her way to Rome, to her husband's palazzo--to the great grim building where the big suisse stands on guard by the entrance, and soft-footed servants in black move noiselessly about the high tapestried rooms. Her note with the tiny monogram and the coronet on it said that she was at the Savoy for a few days, and would I come and dine, on her last evening in England, and talk of old days?
I always call the pretty lady who has the honour of bearing the name of one of the oldest families of Italian nobility, "la Princesse Lointaine," for the glint of sunlight her presence brings comes so rarely and vanishes so quickly. It was at the old Delmonico's, at one of the assemblies, that I first met her, an American heiress in her second season, light-haired, large-eyed, with that perfect tact that comes naturally to American and French women. I had letters of introduction to her father, and she, taking entire charge of me as the stranger in the land, made me feel at home, and stamped that ball in my memory as one of my pleasantest recollections. She was married a year later in Rome, and I thought never to see her again; but one day at Fort William, in Calcutta, I got a note with a little monogram and coronet, brought by a peon from the Great Eastern Hotel, and I found that my Princesse Lointaine and her husband, travelling round the world, were making a fortnight's stay in the city by the Hugli, before going on to China and Japan. I showed her and her husband the forlorn grandeur of the empty palaces of the dead King of Oude, the spot where the Black Hole was, the church by the river where the first sturdy British traders left their bones, and all the other sights of Calcutta. They sailed away, and the next time that I saw her was at Venice one summer when Queen Marguerite had gone there for the bathing, and the grave husband, in some office about the court, had gone there also. Once again I saw her in her Roman home. And now, passing through from New York to the grim palazzo in Rome, she had written me a couple of lines to tell me to come and talk to her.