Thus I began to see that in spite of Calliope's distress at the ways of us in Friendship, a matchless delicacy was among its people a dominant note. Not the delicacy born of convention, not that sometimes bred in the crudest by urban standards, but a finer courtesy that will spare the conscious stab which convention allows. It was, if I may say so, a savoir faire of the heart instead of the head. But we had hardly entered upon the hour before the ground for Calliope's warning was demonstrated.
"There!" she herself bridged a pause with her ready little laugh, "I knew somebody'd pass me somethin' while I was saltin' my potato. My brother, older, always said that at home. 'I never salt my potato,' he use' to say, 'without somebody passes me somethin'."
Next instant her eyes flew to my face in a kind of horror, for:—
"We've noticed that at our house, too," Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss observed, vigorously using a salt-shaker, "but then I always believe, myself, in havin' everything properly seasoned in the kitchen before it comes on to the table."
"See!" Calliope signalled me fleetly.
But no one else, and certainly not Mis' Holcomb herself, perceived the surface of things vexed by a ripple.
"Well, now," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady heartily, "that is so about saltin' your potato. I know it now, but I never thought of it right out before. Lots o' things are true that you don't think of right out. Now I come to put my mind on it, I know at our house if I cut up a big plate o' bread we don't eat up half of it; but just as sure as I don't, I hev to get up from the table an' go get more bread."
"I know—we often speak of that!" and "So my husband says," chimed Mis' Holcomb and Mis' Sturgis.
"Seems as if I'd noticed that, too," Calliope said brightly.
Whereupon: "My part," Miss Lucy Liberty contributed shyly, "I always like to see a great big plate of good, big slices o' bread come on to the table. Looks like the crock was full," she added, laughing heartily to cover her really pretty shyness, "an' like you wouldn't run out."