Various Flavors of Coffee by Anthony Capella Page B

you going to finish those oysters? Or shall we order some more?”
    “I had not realized,” I said as she reached for my plate, “that lunch with you was going to turn into a competition.”

    Over the course of that meal I learned rather more about her family. The girls’ mother having died many years before, Pinker was left with a prosperous business that he inherited from his father-in-law, and three daughters, of whom Emily was the eldest.
    These girls he resolved to bring up in the most advanced way possible. The governesses and tutors all came from the various societies—the Society for the Advancement of Knowledge, the Royal Scientific Societies, and so on. The children had been encouraged to read books and attend public lectures.At the same time their father was busy stripping their home of its old-fashioned furnishings, installing electric lights, bathrooms and a telephone, replacing the furniture with the latest styles, and generally embracing all things modern.
    “That is why he is amenable to the idea of us working,” she explained. “Having invested so much in our education, he wants to see us give something back.”
    “That seems a somewhat . . . prosaic attitude to take to his own flesh and blood.”
    “Oh, no—quite the opposite. Father believes in business— believes in its principles, I mean, its power to do good.”
    “And you? Is that how you see it?”
    She nodded.“As I said, working is a luxury for me, but it is also the expression of my moral beliefs. It is only by showing that women can be worth as much as men in the workplace that we will prove we are worthy of the same political and legal rights.”
    “Good Lord.” Suddenly, working to pay off my wine merchant seemed rather ignoble.

    Toward the end of the meal I pulled out my cigarette case. “Mind if I smoke?” I said automatically.
    “I do, rather,” Emily replied. “Oh?” I said, surprised.
    “We will not be able to taste my father’s coffees accurately after breathing a fug of tobacco,” she explained.
    “These make no fug.” I was a little offended. My cigarettes were
    from Benson’s in Old Bond Street; slim ovals of fine Turkish tobacco that filled a room with a drowsy, perfumed mist. “Besides, smoking is one of the very few things I am good at.”
    She sighed.“Very well, then. Let us have one each before we go back.”
    “Excellent,” I said, although this was even more surprising—for a well-brought-up woman to smoke in front of a man was considered quite a racy thing in those days. I offered her the case, and struck a lucifer.
    It is a sensual pleasure to light a woman’s cigarette: her eyes are on the kiss of flame against the tip, which means that yours are on the downward sweep of her lashes and the delicate shape of her upper lip, pursed around the paper tube. “Thank you,” she said, blowing a little trumpet of smoke from the side of her mouth. I nodded, and lit my own.
    She took another drag, and looked thoughtfully at the cigarette in her hand.“If my father notices the smell on us,” she said suddenly, “you must say that it was only you, not me, who was smoking.”
    “He doesn’t approve?”
    Her eyes held mine as she took another pull. “He doesn’t know.” Small barks and puffs of smoke eddied around each word.
    “A woman is entitled to her secrets.”
    “I’ve always hated that expression—it makes it sound as if we’re entitled to nothing else.You’ll be saying we’re the weaker sex next.”
    “You don’t think so?”
    “Oh, Robert. You really are quite hopelessly old-fashioned, aren’t you?”
    “On the contrary. I am every inch à la mode. ”
    “One can be fashionable and still be old-fashioned— underneath your fine clothes. I’m sorry, am I making you blush?”
    I said quietly, “I didn’t think you cared for what is under my clothes.”
    She gazed at me for a moment. It is a phenomenon I have noticed on many occasions, that smoking makes a woman bolder in her