"You don't say!" exclaimed a woman less malevolent or more practical than the others. "Now, I just ain't a-goin' to give you no peace till you give me the receipt for it."
"I'll give it, with pleasure; or better still, you shall have a package of the corn-starch,—'tis worth only a few cents,—with full directions on the label. I might possibly forget some part of them, you know."
"Me too," said several women as one, and criticism was temporarily abated. Before a new excuse for reviving it could be found, the ice-cream—the real article, and without gravy, of course—made its appearance. It was consumed in silence, in as much haste as possible with anything so cold, and also with evident enjoyment. Then the opponent of sinful extravagance remarked:—
"It's awful good—too good! It 'pears wicked to enjoy any earthly thing so much. Besides, you needn't tell me that it ain't awful costly, 'cause I shan't believe it."
"If my word is of so doubtful quality," said Grace, with rising color, "perhaps Mrs. Taggess, with whom you're better acquainted, will inform you."
"'Tis nothing but milk, cream, and sugar," said Mrs. Taggess, who had borrowed Grace's freezer and experimented with it, "and most of you know very well that you've so much milk that you feed some of it to your pigs. The cream in what all of you have eaten would make, perhaps, a single pound of butter, which you would be glad to sell for fifteen cents. The sugar cost not more than five or six cents, and the flavoring, to any one with raspberries in their own garden, would have cost nothing."
The guests gasped in chorus, but the tormentor quickly said:—
"But the ice! Us poor farmin' folks can't afford ice; it's only them that makes their livin' out of us—"
"Excuse me," said Mrs. Taggess, "but many of the farmers, your husband among them, have been telling Doctor Taggess recently that they were going to put up ice-houses next winter, and that they were foolish or lazy for not having already done so before. I'm sure that all of you who have enjoyed the cream so greatly will keep your husbands in mind of it, especially as ice-cream, made at home, is as cheap as the poorest food that any farmer's family eats."