Purple eBooks

CHAPTER X
THE NEW ALLIANCE

The "Great Lexicographer"--tutelary deity of my adopted habitat--has
handed down to shuddering posterity a definition of the act of eating
which might have been framed by a dyspeptic ghoul. "Eat: to devour with
the mouth." It is a shocking view to take of so genial a function:
cynical, indelicate, and finally unforgivable by reason of its very
accuracy. For, after all, that is what eating amounts to, if one must
needs express it with such crude brutality. But if "the ingestion of
alimentary substances"--to ring a modern change upon the older
formula--is in itself a process material even unto carnality, it is
undeniable that it forms a highly agreeable accompaniment to more
psychic manifestations.
And so, as the lamplight, re-enforced by accessory candles, falls on the
little table in the first-floor room looking on Fetter Lane--only now
the curtains are drawn--the conversation is not the less friendly and
bright for a running accompaniment executed with knives and forks, for
clink of goblet and jovial gurgle of wine-flask.


Pages:
174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198