So did Adrienne. She felt her inability to join in conversations like those and had too much tact to attempt it.
Isabey and Lyddon presently recognized that they were leaving the ladies out of their talk and promptly returned to a subject in which all were interested—the makeshifts of the war time.
Lyddon had turned his learning to good account, and had devised means for preparing a good toilet soap in addition to his formula for candles and for what he euphemistically called a hair tonic.
While they sat talking Mrs. Tremaine and Madame Isabey returned from the blockade-runner’s. The latter rushed up to Isabey and embraced him affectionately—an embrace which he returned.
“Ah!” she cried. “We have been to a block—blockhead——”
“A blockade-runner, you mean,” responded Isabey, laughing.
“—and I have bought organdies, such charming organdies from Baltimore, almost as good as those we get in New Orleans and from Cuba, and Adrienne and I will be well dressed during the whole war.”
Such was not Mrs. Tremaine’s idea, who thought that everybody should dress in sackcloth during the war. But she was too well bred to intimate anything of the sort. Her hospitable instincts made her turn to Angela and say: “Angela, have you ordered ‘snack’ for Captain Isabey?”
Isabey looked puzzled, and Lyddon explained that snack was a good old Anglo-Saxon word which was used in lieu of luncheon among a people who had breakfast at eight o’clock and dinner at three.
Angela, feeling conscience-stricken, slipped out on the back porch, where she discovered Hector looking disconsolately at a large and not uninviting tray of “snack.” Hector, however, surveyed it with much dissatisfaction.