He worked with a napkin at a cork: there was a
restrained sibilant escaping pressure, and the liquid rose in frothing
bubbles through the ice.
It was, Lee thought, a golden drink, flooded, up to a variable point,
with an inimitable gaiety. In comparison whiskey was brutalizing;
sherry was involved with a number of material accompanying pleasures;
port was purely masculine and clarets upset him; beer was a beverage
and not a delight; ale a soporific; and Rhine wines he ignored.
Champagne held in solution the rhythm of old Vienna waltzes, of ball
rooms with formal greenery, floating with passions as light as the
tarleton skirts floating about dancing feet. But it wasn't, he
insisted, a wine for indiscriminate youth--youth that couldn't
distinguish between the sweet and the dry. It was for men like himself,
with memories, unrealized dreams. Ugly women, and women who were old,
and certainly prudes, should never be given a sip.
Peyton Morris again filled all the glasses; there was a clatter of
talk, the accent of the South, about Lee; but he grew oblivious of it.
Champagne always gave Fanny a headache; neither was it a drink for
contented mothers, housewives. Contrarily, it was the ideal, the only,
wine for seductions. It belonged most especially to masked balls,
divine features vanishing under a provocative edge of black satin. He
thought of little hidden tables and fantastic dresses, fragile emotion;
lips and knees and garters.
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