The lunch was slight, but its ordering took time and consideration, as it ought, for nothing is so destructive of health and mental tone as the snatching of a mid-day meal at a lunch counter from a bill of fare prepared by God knows whom.  Mr. Russell said that if it took time to buy a horse, it ought to take at least equal time and care to select the fodder that was to make a human being wretched or happy.  Indeed, a man who didn’t give his mind to what he ate wouldn’t have any mind by-and-by to give to anything.  This sentiment had the assent of the table, and was illustrated by varied personal experience; and a deep feeling prevailed, a serious feeling, that in ordering and eating the right sort of lunch a chief duty of a useful day had been discharged.

It must not be imagined from this, however, that the conversation was about trifles.  Business men and operators could have learned something about stocks and investments, and politicians about city politics.  Mademoiselle Vivienne, the new skirt dancer, might have been surprised at the intimate tone in which she was alluded to, but she could have got some useful hints in effects, for her judges were cosmopolitans who had seen the most suggestive dancing in all parts of the world.  It came out incidentally that every one at table had been “over” in the course of the season, not for any general purpose, not as a sightseer, but to look at somebody’s stables, or to attend a wedding, or a sale of etchings, or to see his bootmaker, or for a little shooting in Scotland, just as one might run down to Bar Harbor or Tuxedo.  It was only an incident in a busy season; and one of the fruits of it appeared to be as perfect a knowledge of the comparative merits of all the ocean racers and captains as of the English and American stables and the trainers.  One not informed of the progress of American life might have been surprised to see that the fad is to be American, with a sort of patronage of things and ways foreign, especially of things British, a large continental kind of attitude, begotten of hearing much about Western roughing it, of Alaska, of horse-breeding and fruit-raising on the Pacific, of the Colorado River Canon.  As for stuffs, well yes, London.  As for style, you can’t mistake a man who is dressed in New York.

The wine was a white Riesling from California.  Docstater said his attention had been called to it by Tom Dillingham at the Union, who had a ranch somewhere out there.  It was declared to be sound and palatable; you know what you are drinking.  This led to a learned discussion of the future of American wines, and a patriotic impulse was given to the trade by repeated orders.  It was declared that in American wines lay the solution of the temperance question.  Bobby Simerton said that Burgundy was good enough for him, but Russell put him down, as he saw the light yellow through his glass, by the emphatic affirmation that plenty of cheap American well-made wine would knock the bottom out of all the sentimental temperance societies and shut up the saloons, dry up all those not limited to light wines and beer.  It was agreed that the saloons would have to go.