The one human being for you in the room is your companion.

The space round your chairs is a magic circle, cutting you off from the others, who are mere decorations, beautiful or grotesque.

Between you are substances which it were gross to call food: dainty mysteries of coolness and sudden flavors; a fish salad in which the essences of sea and land are blended in cold, celestial harmony; innermost kernels of the lamb of the salted meadows where must grow the Asphodel on which it fed, in amorous union with what men call a sauce, but really oil and cream and herbs stirred by a god in a dream; peaches in purple ichor chastely clad in snow, melting on the palate as the voice of the divine singer after whom they are named melts in the soul.
It is a pleasant thing--hedonistic?
yes; but why live on lentils when lotus is to your hand?
and, really, at Monte Carlo lentils are quite as expensive--it is a pleasant thing, even for the food-worn wanderer of many restaurants, to lunch _tete-a-tete_ at the Hotel de Paris; but for the young and fresh-hearted to whom it is new, it is enchantment.
"I've often looked at people eating like this and I've often wondered how it felt," said Septimus.
"But you must have lunched hundreds of times in such places." "Yes--but by myself.

I've never had a--" he paused.

"A what ?" "A--a gracious lady," he said, reddening, "to sit opposite me." "Why not ?" "No one has ever wanted me.