The Paired-Off Cave-Dwellers Merely Scowled
On Us As We Scrouged Past Them To A Vacant Bench In A
Far corner.
The waiter, though, bowed before us - a shockheaded personage in
the ruins of a dress suit - at the
Same time saying words which I
took to be complimentary until one of my friends explained that
he had called us something that might be freely translated as a
certain kind of female lobster. Circumscribed by our own inflexible
and unyielding language we in America must content ourselves with
calling a man a plain lobster; but the limber-tongued Gaul goes
further than that - he calls you a female lobster, which seems
somehow or other to make it more binding.
However, I do not really think the waiter meant to be deliberately
offensive; for presently, having first served us with beer which
for obvious reasons we did not drink, he stationed himself alongside
the infirm piano and rendered a little ballad to the effect that
all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and all the World
was a green poison; so, right off, I knew what his trouble was,
for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself
down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody has
liver for breakfast every morning. The waiter was bilious - that
was what ailed him.
For the sake of the conventions I tried to feel apprehensive of
grave peril. It was no use. I felt safe - not exactly comfortable,
but perfectly safe.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 166 of 341
Words from 44779 to 45034
of 93169
