She gave the good woman a soft easy-chair, and then with her own hands took off her bonnet and her shawl, and made her comfortable.
“Now, have you been to breakfast, Aunt Sophie?”
“Yes, honey, at the hotel! And such a breakfast! Instead of good, wholesome tea and coffee and beefsteak, and buckwheat cakes, there was wine, if you believe me! And oranges, and grapes, and figs, and kickshaws! And I tried to be polite and ‘do at Rome as the Romans do,’ but la! I tasted the wine, and it tasted for all the world like vinegar and water, and sugar of lead! And I asked, please, mightn’t I have a cup of coffee, and the waiter, as they called the gosling, or something like that——”
“Wasn’t it the garçon?”
“Yes, gosoon, and he did go soon! He was spry! He asked me, ‘Caffynore or caffylay,’ and I had a hard time to make him understand that I didn’t want no caffy at all, nor any other of their foreign wines, but just coffee, and I did get it at last, just about the splendidest cup of coffee as ever I tasted in all my life. I would have asked the gosling how they made it; but, law! he couldn’t understand more’n half I said to him. The ignorance of these foreigners is amazing. A ’Merican child three years old could have understood what I said better than he did. But they know how to make good coffee.”
“But you could not breakfast entirely on coffee, Aunt Sophie.”
“No, no, honey; but they had good bread, too—excellent bread, and nice fresh butter. And so, you see, I didn’t suffer. And they had a number of different sorts of stews, or hashes, I should call them, but the gosling called them awful hard names. They smelt mighty nice, all of ’em, but I was afeard to ventur’ on any of ’em. I was afeard of frogs. And that gosling was always a sticking one or other of them stews under my very nose, too.”
“Well, Aunt Sophie, you need not be afraid of anything you may find on our table, though we have a French chef.”
“A French shay? That may be good to ride in, but what has that got to do with cooking, honey?”
“I should have said a French cook.”