I don’t suppose a New Yorker ever wants to live anywhere else, but if sentence should be passed on me that I had to spend the rest of my life in Chicago I doubt if I would find the punishment severe. There is something big, wholesome, and vitalizing out here. It is just the sort of place where one would choose to bring up one’s children, the ideal soil and sun and climate for young Americans to grow in. New York is a great exotic hothouse in which orchids thrive; but the question is this: in selecting a young plant for the garden of the world, is an orchid the best plant to choose?
CHAPTER IX
TINS
If E. M. were put in charge of the commissary department we would be given hardtack and water—his suggestions as to food never go any further. I, on the other hand, feel impelled toward chocolate in the way a drunkard is impelled toward rum, and if the supplies were left to me I should fill every thermos with chocolate ice-cream soda water and the sandwich boxes with chocolate cake. But Celia, having little opinion of hardtack and still less of chocolate, which she declared was making me as fat as butter, suddenly took the matter of food supplies into her own hands. Although she acknowledged that she had invited herself upon the expedition in the first place, and that she had agreed to sit under the luggage in the back, she protested that a heavy hamper full of silver and crockery and nothing to eat in it was an inhumanly heavy weight to put her up against, and she would like to arrange things differently.
Of course we told her that if she felt like rising above her surroundings it was not for us to hold her down. So without any more ado she shipped the beautiful lunch basket home by freight and dragged me out with her to buy a more practical substitute. Her first purchase was a large, white, tin breadbox—just an ordinary box with a padlock, neither lining nor fixtures.
“What for?” I asked.
“To put things in,” said she. “It is going to be padlocked and it is going to stand flat on the floor of the tonneau and stay there, and not tumble over on me! Also we won’t have to have it lugged up to our room at night or carted down in the morning.”
“Excellent!” I agreed enthusiastically. “Let’s have paper plates and five-cents-a-dozen spoons and throw them away and not have to fuss with anything to be washed.”
At a ten-cent store we bought only three knives, but dozens of plates and spoons and enough oiled paper to wrap sandwiches for an expedition. Then we went to a beautiful grocery store near the hotel and laid in a supply of everything imaginable that comes in china, glass, or tin! Chicken, ham, tongue, pheasant in tubes like tooth paste, pâté de foie gras in china, big pieces of chicken in glass, nuts, jam, marmalade, and honey.
One article of food that we had tried to find ever since leaving New York was still unobtainable. Neither brittle bread nor protopuffs had ever been heard of west of New York, and our Chicago grocer looked as blank as the rest. Either New York women are the only ones who worry about keeping their figures or else the women of other cities stay slim naturally! Nothing but good, rich fat-producing bread and butter to be had, to say nothing of chocolate! And our waistbands getting tighter every day! Not E. M.—he being very young is as lathlike as ever.