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Venetian Life by William Dean Howells
page 65 of 329 (19%)
each other. It is a mistake, I think, to expect much talk from any people
at dinner. The ingenious English tourists who visit the United States from
time to time, find us silent over our meat, and I have noticed the like
trait among people of divers races in Europe.

As I have said, the greater part of the diners at the restaurants are
single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill of
the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals, is
rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a
drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,--no, not at evening
parties,--and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the caffe and the
restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the higher privileges
of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once the most gross and
insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the world. Our boarding-
house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as it often is, seems to me
infinitely better than the restaurant life of young Italy. It is
creditable to Latin Europe that, with all this homelessness and domestic
outlawry, its young men still preserve the gentleness of civilization.

The families that share the exile of the eating-houses sometimes make
together a feeble buzz of conversation, but the unfriendly spirit of the
place seems soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent the restaurant
for economy's sake. Fuel is costly, and the restaurant is cheap, and its
cooking better than they could perhaps otherwise afford to have. Indeed,
so cheap is the restaurant that actual experience proved the cost of a
dinner there to be little more than the cost of the raw material in the
market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the custom, which is common,
of sending home to purchasers meals from the eating-houses.

As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, the difference is not so
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