Letitia and I both felt weak and miserable. We had made up our minds not to dine out. We were resolved to keep the home up, even if, in return, the home kept us down. Give in, we wouldn't. Our fighting blood was up. We firmly determined not to degenerate into that clammy American institution, the boarding-house feeder and the restaurant diner. We knew the type; in the feminine, it sits at table with its bonnet on, and a sullen gnawing expression of animal hunger; in the masculine, it puts its own knife in the butter, and uses a toothpick. No cook—no—lack of cook—should drive us to these abysmal depths.
Letitia made no feint at Ovid. I simply declined to breathe the breath of The Lives of Great Men. She read a sweet little classic called "The Table; How to Buy Food, How to Cook It, and How to Serve It," by Alessandro Filippini—a delightful table-d'hôte-y name. I lay back in my chair and frowned, waiting until Letitia chose to break the silence. As she was a most chattily inclined person on all occasions, I reasoned that I should not have to wait long. I was right.
"Archie," said she, "according to this book, there is no place in the civilized world that contains so large a number of so-called high-livers, as New York City, which was educated by the famous Delmonico and his able lieutenants."
"Great Heaven!" I exclaimed with a groan, "why rub it in, Letitia? I should also say that no city in the world contained so large a number of low-livers."
"'Westward the course of Empire sways,'" she read, "'and the great glory of the past has departed from those centers where the culinary art at one time defied all rivals. The scepter of supremacy has passed into the hands of the metropolis of the New World'."
"What sickening cant!" I cried. "What fiendishly exaggerated restaurant talk! There are perhaps fifty fine restaurants in New York. In Paris, there are five hundred finer. Here we have places to eat in; there, they have artistic resorts to dine in. One can dine anywhere in Paris. In New York, save for those fifty fine restaurants, one feeds. Don't read any more of your cook-book to me, my girl. It is written to catch the American trade, with the subtile pen of flattery."
"Try and be patriotic, dear," she said soothingly. "Of course, I know you wouldn't allow a Frenchman to say all that, and that you are just talking cussedly with your own wife."
A ring at the bell caused a diversion. We hailed it. We were in the humor to hail anything. The domestic hearth was most trying. We were bored to death. I sprang up and ran to the door, a little pastime to which I was growing accustomed. Three tittering young women, each wearing a hat in which roses, violets, poppies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots, feathers and ribbons ran riot, confronted me.
"Miss Gerda Lyberg?" said the foremost, who wore a bright red gown, and from whose hat six spiteful poppies lurched forward and almost hit me in the face.
For a moment, dazed from the cook-book, I was nonplussed. All I could say was "No," meaning that I wasn't Miss Gerda Lyberg. I felt so sure that I wasn't, that I was about to close the door.