"Oh, isn't it rare to find a woman who can properly interpret Beethoven?"
Father was in the room and spoke up. "Yes," he said, "and rarer still, in these days, to find one who can properly interpret the bake-oven."
Marcella thinks the world and all of Beethoven and Wagner and other persons whose names are not spelt the way you would think.
Later, when there wasn't anybody present but just those two, I heard Julius ask Marcella if she would "sit" to him. I thought at first he must be proposing, for the folks around here say that Widow Hollis is "setting up to" anybody when she's trying to marry. But Marcella said right away that she would be delighted, which I knew couldn't mean marrying, for when a young lady gets proposed to she never even lets on how glad she is, much less says delighted right out in plain words. He said her face was the purest Greek he ever saw, which didn't make her mad, although it would me, for a Greek is a smiling, oily-looking person which runs a candy kitchen.
When he mentioned her face looking like a Greek's face she acted so pleased that he went on to tell her he had never been so impressed with anybody's looks in his life as he was with hers that first day under the cedar tree. He said oh, if he had such a model he could do anything, for he was sure she had soul as well as beauty. The idea of him telling her she had a soul—as if anybody but foreign heathens didn't have! She said she thought it would be a noble life to be a model and inspiration to a man of lofty ideals—like Dan T. Gabriel Rosetty's wife was, only sometimes the woman was starved. If I'd been Marcella I'd been ashamed to mention such a thing as not getting enough to eat, but it seemed to please Julius, for he got over closer and commenced making a sketch of her on the back of an envelope.
This morning early Mrs. and Professor Young came over to ask father where they could find a Yule log and a peacock. They said in the "eternal fitness of things" they must have a log to burn all Christmas night and a peafowl to serve with "brilliant plumage" at the dinner table. Mrs. Young went around to the kitchen to ask Mammy Lou if she knew how to prepare the peacock the way they wanted it and brought to the table in its feathers with the tail spread. Mammy wasn't a speck more polite than she was last summer about the roosters.
"No, ma'am," she told her, "Mis' Mary won't let even so much as a pin feather come on her table, much less a whole crittur covered with 'em. Looks like that would turn a nigger's stomach, let alone white folks; but there ain't no 'countin' for the taste o' Yankees."
Professor Young tried to explain that he was cooked without the feathers which was put on afterward and an old English custom, but that wouldn't pacify mammy.
"Well, all I can say for the old English is that they must have stomachs on 'em like buzzards," mammy told them.
The Yule log was easier and so they got that, but it isn't to be lit till to-morrow night with ceremony.