"The best we can make," answered Mrs. Armadale; "I believe in everybody doin' the best he kin with what he has got to work with; but food ain't worth so much that we should pay a large price for it."
The gentleman's eye glanced with a scarcely perceptible movement over the table at which he was sitting. Bread, indeed, in piles of white flakiness; and butter; but besides, there was the cold ham in delicate slices, and excellent-looking cheese, and apples in a sort of beautiful golden confection, and cake of superb colour and texture; a pitcher of milk that was rosy sweet, and coffee rich with cream. The glance that took all this in was slight and swift, and yet the old lady was quick enough to see and understand it.
"Yes," she said, "it's all our'n, all there is on the table. Our cow eats our own grass, and Madge, my daughter, makes the butter and the cheese. We've raised and cured our own pork; and the wheat that makes the bread is grown on our ground too; we farm it out on shares; and it is ground at a mill about four miles off. Our hens lay our eggs; it's all from home."
"But suppose the case of people who have no ground, nor hens, nor pork, nor cow? they must buy."
"Of course," said the old lady; "everybody ain't farmers."
"I am ready to wish I was one," said Dillwyn. "But even then, I confess, I should want coffee and tea and sugar—as I see you. do."
"Well, those things don't grow in America," said Mrs. Armadale.
"And spice don't, neither, mother," observed Charity.
"So it appears that even you send abroad for luxuries," Mr. Dillwyn went on. "And why not? And the question is, where shall we stop? If I want coffee, I must have money to buy it, and the better the coffee the more money; and the same with tea. In cities we must buy all we use or consume, unless one is a butcher or a baker. May I not try to get more money, in order that I may have better things? We have got round to our starting-point."
"'They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare,'" Mrs.
Armadale said quietly.