"I'm goin' to find the prettiest girl in Paris, and then you'll see the dust fly, Howe, old man."
The hors d'oeuvre came on a circular three-tiered stand; red strips of herrings and silver anchovies, salads where green peas and bits of carrot lurked under golden layers of sauce, sliced tomatoes, potato salad green-specked with parsley, hard-boiled eggs barely visible under thickness of vermilion-tinged dressing, olives, radishes, discs of sausage of many different forms and colours, complicated bundles of spiced salt fish, and, forming the apex, a fat terra-cotta jar of paté de foie gras. Howe poured out pale-coloured Chablis.
"I used to think that down home was the only place they knew how to live, but oh, boy ..." said Tom Randolph, breaking a little loaf of bread that made a merry crackling sound.
"It's worth starving to death on singe and pinard for four months."
After the hors d'oeuvre had been taken away, leaving them Rabelaisianly gay, with a joyous sense of orgy, came sole hidden in a cream-coloured sauce with mussels in it.
"After the war, Howe, ole man, let's riot all over Europe; I'm getting a taste for this sort of livin'."
"You can play the fiddle, can't you, Tom?"
"Enough to scrape out _Auprès de ma blonde_ on a bet."
"Then we'll wander about and you can support me.... Or else I'll dress as a monkey and you can fiddle and I'll gather the pennies."
"Look, we must have some red wine with the veal."
"All the same to me as long as there's plenty of it."
Their round table with its white cloth and its bottles of wine and its piles of ravished artichoke leaves was the centre of a noisy, fantastic world. Ever since the orgy of the hors d'oeuvres things had been evolving to grotesqueness, faces, whites of eyes, twisted red of lips, crow-like forms of waiters, colours of hats and uniforms, all involved and jumbled in the mélee of talk and clink and clatter.
The red hand of the waiter pouring the Chartreuse, green like a stormy sunset, into small glasses before them broke into the vivid imaginings that had been unfolding in their talk through dinner. No, they had been saying, it could not go on; some day amid the rending crash of shells and the whine of shrapnel fragments, people everywhere, in all uniforms, in trenches, packed in camions, in stretchers, in hospitals, crowded behind guns, involved in telephone apparatus, generals at their dinner-tables, colonels sipping liqueurs, majors developing photographs, would jump to their feet and burst out laughing at the solemn inanity, at the stupid, vicious pomposity of what they were doing. Laughter would untune the sky. It would be a new progress of Bacchus. Drunk with laughter at the sudden vision of the silliness of the world, officers and soldiers, prisoners working on the roads, deserters being driven towards the trenches would throw down their guns and their spades and their heavy packs, and start marching, or driving in artillery waggons or in camions, staff cars, private trains, towards their capitals, where they would laugh the deputies, the senators, the congressmen, the M.P.'s out of their chairs, laugh the presidents and the prime ministers, and kaisers and dictators out of their plush-carpeted offices; the sun would wear a broad grin and would whisper the joke to the moon, who would giggle and ripple with it all night long.... The red hand of the waiter, with thick nails and work-swollen knuckles, poured Chartreuse into the small glasses before them.