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As we took our places at table, it became evident, in spite of the recreative character of the club, that here was no body of amateurs, to whom travel meant merely London and Paris, the Rhine and the Riviera. I recognized a former director of the American School in Rome, an artist and a craftsman who had just returned from Japan and India, an importer of things Persian, and a biologist who spent half his time in the South Seas. Professor Maturin described the other members to me as an engineer who had developed oil wells in China, an archaeologist who directed excavations in Syria, former secretaries of legation at St. Petersburg and at Constantinople, an army officer from Manila, and an explorer who had climbed everything but the mountains of the moon.

The dinner, although entirely without pose, was intentionally and interestingly exotic. Russian preserved cucumbers and a soup of chestnuts from the south of France were followed by an entrée of lamb, prepared according to a Constantinople recipe, and by boned capon. The colonel mixed a Filipino salad-dressing, and with it the archaeologist supplied cigarettes made of coffee leaves. Finally, the engineer introduced a South American dessert of ripe red bananas, guava jelly, and sharp cheese, and with this was served Carlsbad burnt-fig coffee. The wines, although poured sparingly, were as interesting as the food. The cigars were Cuban vegueras. The endeavor, which was surely realized throughout, had evidently been to seek the unusual, not for the sake of mere strangeness, but for an excellence unattainable through the ordinary.