The lawyer was a true Magyar of the first water. And when he perceived that the crab soup was made with butter, he put down his spoon beside his plate and said he could not eat crabs. Since he had learned that the crab was nought else but a beetle living in water, and since a company had been formed in Germany for making beetles into preserves for dessert, he had been unable to look with undismayed eye upon these retrograde monsters.
"Ach, take it away, Boris," sighed the host. He himself was not eating, for was he not atoning for his sins?
Mistress Boris removed the dish with an expression of violent anger.
Just imagine a housekeeper, whose every ambition is the kitchen, when her first dish is despatched away from the table without being touched.
The second dish—eggs stuffed with sardines—suffered the same fate.
The lawyer declared on his word of honor that they had buried his grandfather for tasting a dish of sardines, and that every female in the family immediately went into spasms from the smell of the same. He would rather eat a whale than a sardine.
"Take this away, too, Mistress Boris. No one will touch it." Mistress Boris began to mutter under her breath that it was absurd and affected to turn up one's nose at these respectable eatables, which were quite as good as those they had eaten in their grandfather's house. Her last words were rather drowned by the creaking of the door as she went out.
Then followed some kind of salad, with bread crumbs. The lawyer had in his university days received such a dangerous fever from eating such stuff, that it would indeed be a fatal enterprise to tackle it now.
This was too much for the housekeeper. She attacked Mr. Sárvölgyi:
"Didn't I tell you not to cook a fasting dinner? Didn't I say so? You think everyone is as devout as you are in keeping Friday? Now you have it. Now I am disgraced."