The harps and violins gave the situation a pathetic thrill and served as a background for conversation, just as the vague murmurs of a hidden orchestra give the effect in the theater of psalmody or of melancholy verses moving the listener to tears.
They ate with the nervousness which joy supplies.

At some tables further on a young man and woman were forgetting the courses in order to clasp hands underneath the cloth and place knee against knee with frenzied pressure.

The two were smiling, looking at the landscape and then at each other.

Perhaps they were foreigners recently married, perhaps fugitive lovers, realizing in this picturesque spot the billing and cooing so many times anticipated in their distant courtship.
Two English doctors from a hospital ship, white haired and uniformed, were disregarding their repast in order to paint directly in their albums, with a childish painstaking crudeness, the same panorama that was portrayed on the postal cards offered for sale at the door of the restaurant.
A fat-bellied bottle with a petticoat of straw and a long neck attracted Freya's hands to the table.

She ridiculed the sobriety of Ferragut, who was diluting with water the reddish blackness of the Italian wine.
"Thus your ancestors, the Argonauts, must have drunk," she said gayly.
"Thus your grandfather, Ulysses, undoubtedly drank." And herself filling the captain's glass with an exaggeratedly careful division of the parts of water and wine, she added gayly: "We are going to make a libation to the gods." These libations were very frequent.