At last the door opened, with such a delicate creaking that the lawyer thought somebody was ringing to be admitted:—It was Mistress Boris bringing in the soup.
The lawyer was determined to make some sacrifice, in order to maintain the dignity of the "legale testimonium," by dining a second time. He thought himself capable of this heroic deed.
He was deceived.
There is a peculiarity of the Magyar which has not yet been the subject of song: his stomach will not stand certain things.
This a stranger cannot understand: it is a "specificum."
When Vörösmarty sang that "in the great world outside there is no place for thee,"[37] he found it unnecessary to add the reason for that, which every man knows without his telling them:—"in every land abroad they cook with butter."
[37] From the celebrated Szózat (appeal) calling on the Hungarian to be true to his fatherland.
A Magyar stomach detests what is buttery. He becomes melancholy and sickly from it; he runs away from the very mention of it, and if some sly housekeeper deceitfully gives him buttery things to eat, all his life long he considers that as an attempt upon his life, and will never again sit down to such a poison-mixer's table.
You may place him where you like abroad, still he will long to return from the cursed butter-smelling world, and if he cannot he grows thin and fades away: and like the giraffe in the European climate, he cannot reproduce his kind in a foreign land. Roughly speaking, all his neighbors cook with butter, oil and dripping: and "be harsh or kind, the hand of fate, here thou must live, here die."[38]
[38] Also from the "Szózat."