“What would you call it?” Nancy asked.
“California fruit nut bread, or something like that, and call the custards crême renversé, and the ice-cream, French ice-cream.”
“Oh, dear!” Nancy said, “that isn’t the way I want to do things at all.”
“We can slip the ones that needs them a few things from time to time, can’t we, Molly?” Dolly said.
“We’ll do it,” Nancy said. “I hate the way that the most uninspired ways of doing things turn out to be the best policy after all. I don’t believe in stereotyped philanthropy, but I did think I had found a way around this problem of feeding up people who needed it.”
“They get fed up pretty good if they do pay a regular price for it,” Dolly said. “You can’t get something for nothing in this world, and most everybody knows it by now.”
“I’m managing my restaurant a little differently,” she told Collier Pratt a few days later, 229 as she took her place at the little table beside him, where she habitually ate her dinner. “If you don’t like it you are to tell me, and I’ll see that you have things you will like.”
“This dinner is good,” he said reflectively, “like French home cooking. I haven’t had a real ragoût of lamb since I left the pension of Madame Pellissier. Has your mysterious patroness got tired of furnishing diners de luxe to the populace?”
“Not exactly that,” Nancy said, “but she—she wants me to try out another way of doing things.”
“I thought that would come. That’s the trouble with patronage of any kind. It is so uncertain. There is no immediate danger of your being ousted, is there?”