“Why, you have been eating breakfast for three quarters of a century and ought to know,” I answered.
“I’ve lived just long enough, Doctor, to learn that eating breakfast before working for it is a bad habit that follows civilization.”
“I agree with you there. It is a mere matter of taste after all. As a doctor I eat breakfast before I work, not because it is a bad habit, but because I am a doctor, and must know how it acts in order to be able to treat others who do it. I eat to learn.”
“And I suppose they charged you a dollar for the lesson, for learning how it tasted?”
“No,” I said, “this isn’t a dollar car. Meals are served à la carte. You can get all you want for less than a dollar, unless you have an officious waiter who puts on so much style for you that you feel ashamed to take back what is left of your dollar. If you are a grapefruit faddist your breakfast costs a quarter more. Or if you are rich and don’t know any better you can take sweetened grapefruit, breakfast food smothered with sugar, an omelette with jelly, melted butter on toast, coffee sweetened into syrup, griddle cakes served with honey and milk, and Apollinaris to wash it all down, and can spend a couple of dollars and lay up disease for the future, as the lady and gentleman across from me were doing. I had a fine large piece of broiled white fish, with Saratoga potatoes, cornbread, two cups of coffee and a pitcher of hot milk, all for eighty cents, less than double the price of a common restaurant breakfast.”
“You have to pay something to keep the wheels going around,” he remarked.
“Yes, and for the comfort and convenience,” I answered. “It’s worth it. You can get chops for fifty cents, a tenderloin steak for sixty-five cents, or eggs for twenty cents.”
The old man’s eyes opened wider and he began to swallow saliva as I continued:
“They have a fine list of specials on the bill of fare this morning: Spanish omelette, hashed chicken with poached eggs, shad’s roe with bacon, and a lot of dainty dishes at popular prices.”
He put down his cigar and said, “I say, stranger, I’m getting hungry for something good to eat, even if I don’t know what tastes good. I believe I’ll go in and try it.”