There was a dinner. It was Hitty’s conception of an emergency meal—the kind of thing that her mother before her had prepared on wash-day when an unexpected relative alighted from the noon train, and surprised her into inadvertent hospitality. It began with steamed clams and melted butter sauce. Hitty knew a fish market where the clams were imported direct from Cape Cod by the nephew of a man who used to go to school with her husband’s brother, and he warranted every clam she bought of him. They were served in soup plates and the drawn butter in demi-tasses, but Hitty would have it no other way. The pièce de résistance was ham and eggs, great fragrant crispy slices of ham browned faintly gold across their pinky surface, and eggs—Hitty knew where to get country eggs, too—so white, so golden-yolked, so tempting that it was difficult to associate them with the prosaic process of frying, but fried they were. With them were served boiled potatoes in their jackets,—no wash-day cook ever removed the peeling from an emergency potato,—and afterward a course of Hitty’s famous huckleberry dumplings, the lightest, most ephemeral balls of dumplings 148 that were ever dipped into the blue-black deeps of hot huckleberry—not blueberry, but country huckleberry—sauce.
“Where’s the coffee?” Nancy asked Dolly miserably, when the humiliating meal was drawing to its close.
“She won’t make coffee,” Dolly whispered; “she says it will keep everybody awake, and they’re much better off without it, but Miss Betty, she’s watching her chance, and she’s making it.”
Collier Pratt had received each course in silence, but had eaten heartily of the food that was set before him.
“I suppose he was hungry enough to eat anything,” Nancy thought; “the lunch was humiliating enough, but this surpasses anything I dreamed of.”
She had given up trying to estimate the calories that each man was likely to average in partaking of Hitty’s menu. She noticed that a great many of her patrons had taken second helpings, and that threw her out in her calculation of quantities, while the relative digestibility of the protein and the fats in pork depend so much upon its preparation that she 149 could not approximate the virtue of Hitty’s bill of fare without consultation with Hitty.
“That was a very excellent dinner,” Collier Pratt broke through her painful reverie to make his pronouncement. “Astonishing, but very satisfactory. It reminds me of days on my grandfather’s farm when I was a youngster.”
“I should think it might,” Nancy said, for the first time in her relation with her new friend becoming ironical on her own account. Then she added seriously, “It’s Hitty, you know, that will have all the real care of Sheila. I’m pretty busy down here, and I—” she hesitated, half expecting him to threaten to remove his child at once from the prospective guardianship of a creature who reverted so readily to the barbarism of ham and eggs.
“Well, if it’s Hitty that is to have the care of Sheila,” Collier Pratt said, and Nancy was not longer puzzled as to which element of her parentage Sheila owed her Irish complexion, “why, more power to her!”