"He amuses me," Sylvia said. "What are you going to have?"
"Well, I _was_ going to have a grenadier, but really if that skelington opposite is going to look at me all night, I think I'll take something stronger."
"It's the same relation to a curaçao that a grenadier is to a grenadine."
"What I should really like is a nice little drop of whisky with a little tiddley bit of lemon; but there, I've noticed if you ask for whisky in Paris it causes a regular commotion. The waiter holds the bottle as if it was going to bite him, and the proprietor winks at him he's pouring out too much, and I can't abide those blue siphons. Sells they call them, and sells they are."
"I shall order you a bock in a moment," Sylvia threatened.
"Now don't be unkind just because I made a slight complaint about being stared at. Perhaps they won't make such a bother if I _do_ have a little whisky. But there, I can't resist it. It's got a regular taste of London, whisky has."
The man at the table leaned over suddenly and asked, in a tense voice:
"Oh, good land! what a turn you gave me! I couldn't have jumped more," Mrs. Gainsborough exclaimed, "not if one of the lions in Trafalgar Square had said pip-ip as I passed!"
"You didn't think I was English, did you?" said the stranger. "I forget it myself sometimes. I'm a terrible warning to the world. I'm a pose that's become a reality."
"Pose?" Mrs. Gainsborough echoed. "Oh, I didn't understand you for the moment. You mean you're an artist's model?"
The stranger turned his eyes upon Sylvia, and, whether from sympathy or curiosity, she made friends with him, so that when they were ready to go home the eccentric Englishman, whom every one called Milord and who did not offer any alternative name to his new friends, said he would walk with them a bit of the way, much to Mrs. Gainsborough's embarrassment.
"I'm the first of the English decadents," he proclaimed to Sylvia. "Twenty years ago I came to Paris to study art. I hadn't a penny to spend on drugs. I hadn't enough money to lead a life of sin. There's a tragedy! For five years I starved myself instead. I thought I should make myself interesting. I did. I became a figure. I learned the raptures of hunger. Nothing surpasses them--opium, morphine, ether, cocaine, hemp. What are they beside hunger? Have you got any coco with you? Just a little pinch? No? Never mind. I don't really like it. Not really. Some people like it, though. Who's the old woman with you? A procuress? Last night I had a dream in which I proved the non-existence of God by the least common multiple. I can't exactly remember how I did it now. That's why I was so worried this evening; I can't remember if the figures were two, four, sixteen, and thirty-eight. I worked it out last night in my dream. I obtained a view of the universe as a geometrical abstraction. It's perfectly simple, but I cannot get it right now. There's a crack in my ceiling which indicates the way. Unless I can walk along that crack I can't reach the center of the universe, and of course it's hopeless to try to obtain a view of the universe as a geometrical abstraction if one can't reach the center. I take it you agree with me on that point. That point! Wait a minute. I'm almost there. That point. Don't let me forget. That point. That is the point. Ah!"