er of
this description, are assuredly both mentally and morally lacking. Men
and women there are who will say: "Oh, give me anything. I'm not
particular--so long as it is plain and wholesome." I've met many of
these people. My experience of them is that they are the greatest
gluttons on earth, with veritably voracious appetites, and that the best
isn't good enough for them. To be sure, at a pinch, they will demolish a
score of potatoes, if there be nothing else; but offer them caviare,
canvas-back duck, quail, and nesselrode pudding, and they will look
askance at food that is plain and wholesome. The "plain and wholesome"
liver is a snare and a delusion, like the "bluff and genial" visitor
whose geniality veils all sorts of satire and merciless comment.

Letitia and I both felt weak and miserable. We had made up our minds not
to dine out. We were resolved to keep the home up, even if, in return,
the home kept us down. Give in, we wouldn't. Our fighting blood was up.
We firmly determined not to degenerate into that clammy American
institution, the boarding-house feeder and the restaurant diner. We
knew the type; in the feminine, it sits at table with its bonnet on, and
a sullen gnawing expression of animal hunger; in the masculine, it puts
its own knife in the butter, and uses a toothpick. No cook--no lack of
cook--should drive us to these abysmal depths.

Letitia made no feint at Ovid. I simply declined to breathe the breath
of _The Lives of Great Men_. She read a sweet little classic called "The
Table; How to Buy Food, How to Cook It, and How to Serve It," by
Alessandro Filippini--a delightful _table-d'hote_-y name. I lay back in
my chair and frowned, waiting until Letitia chose to break the silence.
As she was a most chattily inclined person on all occasions, I reasoned
that I should not have to wait long. I was right.

"Archie," said she, "according to this book, there is no place in the
civilized world that contains so large a number of so-called high-livers
as New York City, which was educated by the famous Delmonico and his
able lieutenants."

"Great Heaven!" I exclaimed with a groan, "why rub it in, Letitia? I
should also say that no city in the world contained so large a number of
low-livers."

"'Westward the course of Empire sways,'" she read, "'and the great glory
of the past has departed from those centers where the culinary art at
one time defied all rivals. The scepter of supremacy has passed into the