atoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's
theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that
salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad
dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men--raw outlanders to be
sure--in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they
did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but
in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know
any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to
make a salad dressing like that--and the whole town knows that was the
price--the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old
furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed
ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get
their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.

Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having
lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of
this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest
side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a
beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin,
garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the
meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man
leave home to follow it. She passed cigars at the table, and after the
guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles
appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which
the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw
down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But
in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender
did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.

The war went on without abatement. During the spring that followed the
winter of the beefsteak dinner many skirmishes, minor engagements,
ambushes and midnight raids occurred. But the contest was not decisive.
For purposes of military drill, the defenders of the Winthrop faith
formed themselves into a Whist Club. _The_ Whist Club they called it,
just as they spoke of Priscilla Winthrop's gowns as "the black and white
one," "the blue brocade," "the white china silk," as if no other black
and white or blue brocade or white china silk gowns had been created in
the world before and could not be made again by human hands