“You see, sir,” she said, “’tis Miss Gertie’s birthday next Tuesday, and the Rectory’s to be full of the visitors they’ve invited to come for it. Now, you’d think that woman Josephine would know better,”—Peggy always had a shy shot at Josephine whom she detested as a foreigner and interloper—“but no, not she. She’s chosen this very time to invite her brother—I hope he is her brother—no doubt because she thinks it will be fine and lively for him with all these rejoicings. And as they can’t find room for him at the Rectory, what does my lady do but coolly propose that you and I should take him in? Now, if he were a healthy honest Englishman I wouldn’t mind. But I can’t abide these foreigners who wont trouble to talk our language,”—Peggy always premised that to speak English by intuition was the birthright of every baby both at home and abroad—“and who live on toads and snails so that one don’t know how to cook for them.”
“Now, my dear Peggy, don’t worry yourself and me; I’m just in the middle of my sermon. Let him come by all means. I know a smattering of French, and shall be rather glad of a chance of improving my accent. Besides, I’ll order the dinners and take all the responsibility off your hands.” Never was heavy charge undertaken with so light a heart.
So Peggy retired, muttering her discontent in the little querulous tones, that, as usual, reminded me of a squirrel when it finds that it has been robbed of its hoard. “I’ll do my best; I can no more; but I’m not going to cook frogs and snails for any foreigner,” was what I heard more and more faintly as her voice receded to the kitchen.
In one respect, at any rate, Peggy was hopelessly astray. Josephine’s friend was an American, and came from Chicago, so that the hopes I had formed of furbishing up my French were doomed to disappointment. It was in a dialect which suggested no possible connection with the French that he opened the conversation immediately on his arrival.
“I don’t care what ‘tucker’ you give me, only I must have cereals.”
So he began.
In my ignorance I read the word “serials,” and imagined that what he wanted was intellectual nourishment while he dined, so I promptly offered him the choice between “Pearson’s” and the “Strand.” “Perhaps,” thought I, “he wishes to study the statistics—amply supplied by these periodicals—of how large an animal would be forthcoming if all the oxen consumed by England in a year were rolled into one.”
But he wanted nothing of the kind. “It is absurd,” he said, “the way you Britishers tamper with your digestions, filling yourselves with heavy, heating food, when all that nature requires is corn and oil and wine—and the less of the latter the better,” he added as an after-thought.
I cordially acquiesced, for he was not a man, I saw, to stand contradiction in any form. But all the while I was troubling myself anent the dinner I had in store for him.
He had arrived late in the afternoon, and in my innocence I had ordered for him a typical English repast—soup, roast beef, and a ‘fondu’ of cheese.