“Are they pleased to-night?” interrupted the Sphinx.
“Are they?” I rejoined. Then I continued my grave discourse: “As I said, we are all free and gay and beautiful and our faces set on pleasure. Then there is the music, the scarce-noted scents and the delicate shapes and colours of flowers, the prismatic glitter of glass, and the exhilarating snowiness of the table-linen....”
“Dave’s beaming smile,” added the Sphinx, referring to our waiter.
“Yes, calling up immediately all the happy dinners we have had at his table. If we were to meet him elsewhere in years to come, how his face would flash these evenings back to us! I believe I could count up the times we have been here by the wrinkles of kindness on his face.”
“I wonder if he really cares about us,” said the Sphinx, wistfully watching Dave as he expertly dismembered a roast duck at a side table. Presently the excellence of the duck turned her thoughts back again to our argument.
“Say what you will, with your conflux of pleasant influences,” she resumed, “roast duck is the real explanation.”
“Who would take you for such a materialist,” said I, “to look at you there, so radiantly delicate, so shiningly spirituelle?--”
“Roast duck,” laughed the Sphinx, “my spirituelle expression comes entirely of roast duck, believe me.”
I could almost believe her in that moment.
“Materialist yourself!” she retorted presently. “You will force me to turn metaphysician and expound to you the mysticism of gastronomy.”
“The metaphysics of duck!” I interjected.
“Well,” she began, “I am perfectly serious. It is you that are the materialist, not I, for the reason that the familiarity of the process of eating blinds you to its essentially mysterious nature; that process of transmutation of gastronomic alchemy, by which food is changed into genius and beauty, and the kitchen seen to be the power-house of the soul. After all, my gastronomic theory of the soul is merely one side of the same mystery which we see illustrated every day on another side by the doctor and the chemist. When we take a dose of medicine to tonic our nerves, we don’t laugh sceptically, or even give a thought to the wonder of its operation. Yet surely it is mystery itself that distillations from plants, and tinctures drawn from stones, should hold for us the keys of life and death, and exalt or depress our immortal spirits. Have you ever thought on the marvel that an almost infinitesimal quantity of certain juices distilled from some innocent-faced meadow-flower, a mere dewdrop of harmless-looking liquid, can shatter our life out of us like a charge of dynamite?...”