een--no more, though
Okoochee could never understand why. On each dinner Mrs. Pardee made a
minimum of seventy-five cents. Eighteen times seventy-five ... naught
and carry the four ... naught ... five ... thirteen-fifty ... seven
times ... well, ninety-five dollars or thereabouts each week isn't so
bad. Out of this Mrs. Pardee managed to bank a neat sum. She figured
that at the end of ten or fifteen years....

"I hate them," said Maxine, washing dishes in the kitchen. "Greedy
pigs."

"They're nothing of the kind. They like good food, and I'm thankful they
do. If they didn't I don't know where I'd be."

"We might be anywhere--so long as it could be away from here. Dull,
stupid, stick-in-the-muds, all of them."

"Why, they're no such thing, Maxine Pardee! They're from all over the
world, pretty nearly. Why, just last Thursday they were counting there
were sixteen different states represented in the eighteen people that
sat down to dinner."

"Pooh! States! That isn't the world."

"What is, then?"

Maxine threw out her arms, sprinkling dish-water from her dripping
finger tips with the wide-flung gesture. "Cairo! Zanzibar! Brazil!
Trinidad! Seville--uh--Samar--Samarkand."

"Where's Samarkand?"

"I don't know. And I'm going to see it all some day. And the different
people. The people that travel, and know about what kind of wine with
the roast and the fish. You know--the kind in the novels that say,
'You've chilled this sauterne too much, Bemish."

"And when you do see all these places," retorted Mrs. Pardee, with the
bitterness born of long years of experience, "you'll find that in every
one of them somebody's got a boarding house called Pardee's, or
something like that, where the people flock same's they do here, for a
good meal."

"Yes, but what kind of people?"

"Same kind that comes here." Sam Pardee had once taken his wife to see a
performance of The Man From Home when that comedy was at the height of
its popularity. A line from this play flashed into Mrs. Pardee's mind
now, and she paraphrased it deftly. "There are just as many kinds of
people in Okoochee as there are in Zanzibar."

"I don't believe it."

"Well, it's so. And I'm thankful we've got the comforts of home."

At this Maxine laughed a sharp little laugh that was almost a bark.
Perhaps she was justified.

The eighteen straggled in between six and six-thirty, nightly. A mixture
of townspeople and strangers. While Maxine poured the water i