"But the plum pudding, Elsie!" cried Elizabeth, now in the full glow of a beautiful ardor; "when Mrs. Cratchit brings in the plum pudding looking like a speckled cannon-ball, hard and firm and blazing with brandy and with Christmas holly stuck in the top of it, wouldn't you rather the little Cratchits ate that?"
"Indeed I would!" said Elsie; "for I never cared for that pudding; they were welcome to it."
Elizabeth dropped her head and was silent; then she murmured, in wounded loyalty to the Cratchits: "It must have been good! Because Dickens said they ate all of it and wanted more. But they tried to look as though they'd had quite sufficient; and I think they were very nice about it, Elsie, for children who had had so little training. They behaved as very well bred, indeed."
"I don't doubt it," said Elsie. "I have nothing against their manners. And I suppose they thought it a good pudding! I merely remarked that I did not think it a good pudding! They had their opinion, and I have my opinion of that pudding."
The subject was abandoned, but a moment later revived by Herbert, sitting at Elizabeth's side:—
"Dickens had a great many more things in the Carol than the turkey and the plum pudding," he observed, with his habit of taking in everything; and he began with a memorized list of the Carol's Christmas luxuries in one heap—passing from geese to punch. "I always like Dickens: he gives you plenty," he concluded.
"Oh, bother!" said Harold, the Kentucky Saxon whose forefathers had been immigrants from Dickens' land. "We have everything in Kentucky that they had, and more besides. They can keep their Dickens!"
"Oh, but Harold," pleaded Elizabeth, "we haven't any American Christmas stories! Not one old fairy tale—not one!"
"We don't want any old English fairy tales. American children don't want fairy tales. Couldn't we have them if we wanted them? I should say so. Can't we make anything in our country that we want?"
"But the little Cratchits, Harold!" insisted Elizabeth, "we do want the little Cratchits!"