"Don't know as I mind," returned Ellen, and followed into the next room. During the space his aunt was absent, Dalton took up the conversation where it had dropped.
"We always think things are hardest to do that are out of our sphere, don't we? I suppose, now, you and Aunt Margaret could both understand making a dress, couldn't you?"
"Oh yes, even though I could not do it," laughed Joyce.
"Well, and I can imagine building the engine, but as for the frock"—he looked at her and made a gesture of impotence—"I should never even attempt it, though I were to lose my head for not trying. In the first place," glancing from the trim, smooth, tailor-made black gown of his guest to the home-cut skirt and shirt-waist of his aunt, just entering, and dimly discerning the difference, "I never thought of it before, but I cannot even conceive how you get into and out of the things. I suppose you do, for I see you women in different ones at times, but my thought would be that they must grow upon you"—he was looking at Joyce—"as the calyx around a blossom. It all seems merged into you, somehow. I never felt it so before."
Mrs. Phelps laughed with hearty enjoyment.
"It's the cut of it, George! You never felt that way looking at me, or—or Rachel Hemphill, say—did you?"
"Why no; it seems a new sensation," laughing half shamefacedly. "But it may be just because the talk called it up. Isn't dinner ready—well, I thought it was time."
A somewhat strident-sounding bell announced it, and the three passed directly into the next room, furnished so conventionally there was absolutely nothing upon which to let the eyes rest in surprise, or pleasure. But it was painfully neat and regular, and both aunt and nephew were secretly satisfied that it must impress even this young heiress as a perfectly proper dining-room. And it did.
Ellen and the "nice lady," who had been sewing for Mrs. Phelps, joined them at once, and the talk languished as each was called upon to help the other in a wearisome round of small dishes, which it seemed to Joyce was like the stage processions that simply go out at one side to come in at the other. But when she tasted of these she no longer begrudged their number. They were each deliciously palatable, having a taste so new to her hotel-sated palate that she could almost have smacked her lips over them in her enjoyment. She had a healthy girlish appetite and the morning had been long. She positively wanted to pass back one or two of the saucers for refilling, but was ashamed of her greediness. Had she known that it would have rejoiced Mrs. Phelps for days to be thus honored by real appreciation of the dainties she had herself prepared, she certainly would have done so. Even Ellen forgot to sniff, and all set to with a vigor that rather precluded conversation.
She thought about it afterwards, as she sat in the train, moving rapidly citywards, and wondered why there had been such positive pleasure in the mere taste of food. She had sat and minced over rich dishes day after day, and never felt that exquisite sense of wholesomeness and recuperation.