“But the greatest pleasure I’ve had is the baked beans,” she went on.
“Pleasure!” echoed the young man. “No pleasure, surely.”
“Oh, I mean mental pleasure, to find they really are, you know, and not merely a myth. Of course, I believed before I came here that they existed here, but as an occasional article of diet. Why, they are a religious rite, an article of faith! Every Saturday night!”
“Yes, and every Sunday morning breakfast at my boarding house,” groaned the young man.
“Impossible! Inhuman!” said Virginia brightly.
“Inhuman, but true,” moaned the young man.
Wendell thought he had never heard such idiocy in his life. Delicious baked beans!
“But they not only eat them—they take them seriously,” Virginia’s silly little voice ran on. “I made a light and unworthy remark to one of Auntie’s friends about the sacred bean. She looked at me compassionately and then said gravely, ‘We always bake them with a small onion in the bottom of the pot.’ Yes, I don’t know who said it first, but it is absolutely true that Boston is a state of mind.”
Wendell, listening with the utmost scorn to these trivialities, was suddenly brought up short.
Boston is a state of mind.