“Do I?” smiled Mrs. Lee. “Our aid society made enough money to buy new dishes and carpet the church, but oh, how we worked!”
“I think that it is cake where your Mother excels,” said Mr. Lee, “but I suppose we shall not have any this noon.”
“If you want it, Father,” said Betty.
“We shall reserve that for our supper lunch, Betty,” said Mrs. Lee, “and we want you to stay for that, Ramon.”
“Thank you, madam–that would be too much, I’m sure. I expect one of the boys, I think. I–I ought to call him up, I suppose, for he was to come for me at three-thirty or four and I may not be able to get back to where I board by that time.”
“Call from here, Ramon,” said Betty. “Oh, Mother, I’m glad you did put those fat raisins in the mince meat!”
But all the conversation did not center upon the food. Mr. Lee drew out in the course of the dinner some facts from Ramon in which the girls were very much interested. He had, indeed, come to America directly from Spain, but his father was Polish and Ramon had seen Paderewski in Poland. He had attended school for several years in a small eastern town where he studied “English and American,” he said.
“I was so behind in everything English, you see, that I had to be put in a lower grade at first than I would have been in in my own country; but I made three grades in one year because I could do the mathematics and such things; and so when I learned to read and speak your language pretty well, it was not so hard. A friend of my father’s brought me here, but he died.”
“Oh, do you understand all the football language now?” asked Dick.
“He certainly must, Dicky, or he wouldn’t have done what he did,” suggested Betty, who did not think that Dick should have asked that question. But Ramon only laughed a little.