ack for more if
it's still too strong?"

"Miss Libbie?"

"Laviny just wants the canister pointed in her direction, an' she thinks
she's had her tea. Lucy don't dare take any. Three lumps for me, please.
I like mine surup."

"Calliope?"

"Oh," said Calliope, "milk if there's any left in the pitcher. An' if
there ain't, send it down clear. I like it most any way. Ain't it queer
about the differ'nce in folks' tastes in their tea and coffee?"

That was the signal for the talk to begin with anecdotes of how various
relatives, quick and passed, had loved to take their tea. No one ever
broached a real topic until this introduction had had its way. To do so
would have been an indelicacy, like familiar speech among those in the
ceremony of a first meeting.

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 husban