right consistency. I am a good cook myself"--he turned to me.

"How interesting," I said, attempting to infuse just the right amount of
enthusiasm into my voice.

"Oh yes--when one is not married it is necessary. As for me, I have had
all I wanted from women without marriage." He tucked his napkin into his
collar and blew upon his soup as he spoke. "Now at nine o'clock I make
myself an English breakfast, but not much. Four slices of bread, two eggs,
two slices of cold ham, one plate of soup, two cups of tea--that is nothing
to you."

He asserted the fact so vehemently that I had not the courage to refute it.

All eyes were suddenly turned upon me. I felt I was bearing the burden of
the nation's preposterous breakfast--I who drank a cup of coffee while
buttoning my blouse in the morning.

"Nothing at all," cried Herr Hoffmann from Berlin. "Ach, when I was in
England in the morning I used to eat."

He turned up his eyes and his moustache, wiping the soup drippings from his
coat and waistcoat.

"Do they really eat so much?" asked Fraulein Stiegelauer. "Soup and
baker's bread and pig's flesh, and tea and coffee and stewed fruit, and
honey and eggs, and cold fish and kidneys, and hot fish and liver? All the
ladies eat, too, especially the ladies."

"Certainly. I myself have noticed it, when I was living in a hotel in