"They had some excuse," said Clovis. "They did it to save their
immortal souls, didn't they? You needn't tell me that a man who
doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul,
or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being
unhappy highly developed."

Clovis relapsed for a few golden moments into tender intimacies
with a succession of rapidly disappearing oysters.

"I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," he resumed
presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they
justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to
them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter
thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in
Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic
unselfishness of an oyster. Do you like my new waistcoat? I'm
wearing it for the first time to-night."

"It looks like a great many others you've had lately, only worse.
New dinner waistcoats are becoming a habit with you."

"They say one always pays for the excesses of one's youth;
mercifully that isn't true about one's clothes. My mother is
thinking of getting married."

"Again!"

"It's the first time."