"Sunday dinner should be cold mainly," returned Miss Upton calmly. "Mine always was till you came. Of course you're such a splendid cook, Charlotte, it's kind of a temptation to you to spoil me and feed me up, yet you know I ought not to eat much."
"Oh, pshaw," returned Mrs. Whipp. "More folks die from the lack o' good things than from eatin' 'em."
"You'll have to look out," said Miss Mehitable warningly, following her friend's lead to the sunny living-room where the table was spread. "It's a sayin' that good cooks are always cross. The better you cook the more you must watch to have your temper as sweet as your sauces."
"Ho! Vinegar's just as important as oil," retorted the other. "You're so smooth to everybody it's a good thing I came to live with you and keep you from bein' imposed upon."
Miss Mehitable laughed. "You think together we make a pretty good salad, do you?" she returned.
When dinner was on the table and they were both seated, Miss Upton spoke again:
"I wonder how you're goin' to like it to the port?" she said.
"Awful rheumatic, I sh'd think 'twould be," returned Mrs. Whipp.
"Pretty soon we'll have to be goin'," said Miss Upton. "I usually lock everything up here tight as a drum for three months. I was talkin' to a man in town yesterday that thought it was a joke that folks in Keefe just went a few miles to their seashore cottages. He was from Chicago where you have to go a thousand miles to get anywhere. I told him I couldn't see anything funny about it. Keefe was a village and Keefeport was a resort; but he kept on laughin' and said it was like lockin' the door of one home and goin' across the street to another, then back again in the fall. I told him I was full as satisfied as I would be to have to make my way through Indians and buffaloes to get anywhere as you have to in those wild Western cities. He claimed that it was perfectly civilized around Chicago now; but of course he'd say that."
"H'm," returned Mrs. Whipp, non-committally.