Because it was talked about and crowded, ordinary untutored motorists judged Miss Mitchin’s the best place to go, and permitted their wives to drag them past the tortoise-shell spectacles and the unprostituted art and the angular young ladies in baggy smocks breaking out in sudden irresponsible imitations of Pavlova.
None of this subtlety, this psycho-analysis and fellowship of the arts, was evident to the Applebys. They didn’t understand the problem, “Why is a Miss Mitchin?” All that they knew, as they dragged weary joints down the elm-rustling road and back to the bakery on Main Street, was that Miss Mitchin’s caravanserai was intimidatingly grand—and very busy.
They were plodding out of town again when Mother exclaimed, “Why, Father, you forgot to get your cigarettes.”
“No, I— Oh, I been smoking too much. Do me good to lay off.”
They had gone half a mile farther before she sighed: “Cigarettes don’t cost much. ’Twouldn’t have hurt you to got ’em. You get ’em the very next time we’re in town—or send Katie down. I won’t have you denying—”
Her voice droned away. They could think of nothing but mean economies as they trudged the wide and magic night of the moors.
When they were home, and the familiar golden-oak chairs and tidies blurred their memory of Miss Mitchin’s crushing competition, Father again declared that no dinky tea-pot inn could permanently rival Mother’s home-made doughnuts. But he said it faintly then, and more faintly on the days following, for inactivity again enervated him—made him, for the first time in his life, feel almost old.