“Good heavens!” laughed Hester. “Where was that? In a shipwreck?”
“No; in New York. It wasn’t bad. I used to eat a pound a day—there were twelve to a pound of the white pilot-bread, and four apples.”
“Do you mean to say that you were deliberately starving yourself? What for?”
“Oh, no! I had no money, and I wanted to write a book, so that I couldn’t get anything for my work till it was done. It wasn’t like little jobs that one’s paid for at once.”
“How funny!” exclaimed Hester. “Did you hear that, Walter?” she asked.
“Yes; but he’s done all sorts of things.”
“Were you ever as hard up as that, Walter?”
“Not for so long; but I’ve had my days. Haven’t I, Griggs? Do you remember—in Paris—when we tried to make an omelet without eggs, by the recipe out of the ‘Noble Booke of Cookerie,’ and I wanted to colour it with yellow ochre, and you said it was poisonous? I’ve often thought that if we’d had some saffron, it would have turned out better.”
“You cooked it too much,” answered Griggs, gravely. “It tasted like an old binding of a book—all parchment and leathery. There’s nothing in that recipe anyhow. You can’t make an omelet without eggs. I got hold of the book again, and copied it out and persuaded the great man at Voisin’s to try it. But he couldn’t do anything with it. It wasn’t much better than ours.”