“I’d like to see the school class that could prepare this dinner,” said Mrs. Woodruff.
“Why,” said Jim, “you’d be there showing them how! They’d get credits in their domestic-economy course for getting the school dinner—and they’d bring their mothers into it to help them stand at the head of their classes. And one detail of girls would cook one week, and another serve. The setting of the table would come in as a study—flowers, linen and all that. And when we get a civilized teacher, table manners!”
“I’d take on that class,” said the hired man, winking at Selma Carlson, the maid, from somewhere below the salt. “The way I make my knife feed my face would be a great help to the children.”
“And when the food came on the table,” Jim went on, with a smile at his former fellow-laborer, who had heard most of this before as a part of the field conversation, “just think of the things we could study while eating it. The literary term for eating a meal is discussing it—well, the discussion of a meal under proper guidance is much more educative than a lecture. This breast-bone, now,” said he, referring to the remains on his plate. “That’s physiology. The cranberry-sauce—that’s botany, and commerce, and soil management—do you know, Colonel, that the cranberry must have an acid soil—which would kill alfalfa or clover?”
“Read something of it,” said the colonel, “but it didn’t interest me much.”
“And the difference between the types of fowl on the table—that’s breeding. And the nutmeg, pepper and cocoanut—that’s geography. And everything on the table runs back to geography, and comes to us linked to our lives by dollars and cents—and they’re mathematics.”
“We must have something more than dollars and cents in life,” said Jennie. “We must have culture.”
“Culture,” cried Jim, “is the ability to think in terms of life—isn’t it?”
“Like Jesse James,” suggested the hired man, who was a careful student of the life of that eminent bandit.
There was a storm of laughter at this sally amidst which Jennie wished she had thought of something like that. Jim joined in the laughter at his own expense, but was clearly suffering from argumentative shock.