“Who wants to live fifty years in this miserable world?” McGlenn broke in.  “There is but one community in which the writer is at ease, and that is the community of death.  It is populous; it is crowded with writers, but it holds an easy place for every one.  The silence of that community frightens the rich but its democracy pleases the poor.”

“I suppose, then, that you want to die.”

“I do.”

“But you didn’t want to die yesterday?”

“Yes, it was the very time when I should have died—­I had just eaten a good dinner.  You don’t know how to eat, John.  You stuff yourself, John.  Yes, you stuff yourself and think that you have dined.  The reason is that you have never taken the trouble to become civilized.  It’s my misfortune to have friends who can’t eat.  But some of my friends can eat, and they are therefore great men.  Tod Cowles strikes a new dish at a house on the North Side and softens his voice and says, ‘Ah hah.’  He is a great man, for he knows that he has discovered an additional pleasure to offset another trouble of this infamous life; and Colonel Norton is a great man—­he knows how to eat; but you, John, are an outcast from the table, and therefore civilization cannot reach you.  Civilization comes to the feast and asks, ’Where is John Richmond, whom I heard some of you say something about?’ and we reply, ‘He holds us in contempt,’ and Civilization pronounces these solemn words:  ‘He who holds ye in contempt, the same will I banish.’”

“But,” rejoined Richmond, “civilization teaches one of two things—­to think or to become a glutton.  Somehow I was kept away from the feast and had to accept the other teaching.  I don’t go about deifying my stomach and making an apostle of the palate of my month.  When I eat”—­

“But you don’t eat; you stuff.  I have sat down to a table with you, and after giving your order you would fill yourself so full of bread and pickles or anything within reach that you couldn’t eat anything when the order was brought.”

“That was abstraction of thought instead of hunger,” Richmond replied.

“No, it was the presence of gluttony.  Can you eat, Mr. Witherspoon?”

“I fear that I must confess a lack of higher civilization.  I am not well schooled in anything, and I suppose that you must class me with Richmond—­as a barbarian.  I lack”—­

“Art,” McGlenn suggested.  “But for you there is a chance.  John Richmond is hopelessly gone.”

“I sometimes feed my dogs on stewed tripe,” said Whittlesy, “and the good that it does them teaches me that man is to be judged largely by what he eats.”

“There is absolutely no use for all this bloody rot,” Mortimer declared.  “Eating is essential, of course, but I don’t see how men can talk for an hour on the subject, and talk foolishly, at that.”

“If eating is essential,” Richmond replied, “it is a wonder that you don’t kick against it.”