Ain't I
the mean dog! Let me make you a cup of tea! Missis dear! In the name
of God eat something! Do!"

"No," I said. "I have always been this way. If I go five minutes over
the time when I expect my dinner, I feel just this way. I can't eat."

With which astonishing lie, I leaned back as if death were already
looming up in the distance.

Mary made one more attack. Salad was the Angel's weak point as asparagus
was mine, and Mary always made a dream of beauty out of it. She scorned
"_fatiguer la laitue_" as the French do. Instead she kept it in a bowl
of water until thoroughly "awake," as she called it. Then carefully
examining each leaf separately, she tied them in a wet cloth and laid
them "spang on the ice," which course of treatment rendered them so crisp
that to cut them with a sharp salad-fork was always to get a little
dressing splashed in one's eye. Furthermore she arranged them in the
best cut-glass dish in symmetrical rows with the scarlet tomatoes tucked
invitingly in the centre. She presented us with such a dish on this
evening. Then when Aubrey (who will be remembered when he is no more,
not for his moral qualities nor for his domestic virtues, but for the
skill with which he used to mix a salad dressing) went to work and
prepared one from tarragon, vinegar, oil, Nepaul pepper, paprika, black
and cayenne pepper, to say nothing of plenty of salt,--words fail me! I
simply pass away at the recollection.

I have never been able to make up my mind whether Mary suspected us or
not. Of course we overdid the part, but it was a physical necessity. I
can go without a thing altogether, but I cannot be moderate. I really
thought I was not hungry until Aubrey told me not to eat, and that, of
course, was enough to make any woman ravenous. If he had told me "to
buck up and eat a good dinner," of course I could only have nibbled.

She broke out again, and pleaded hard for us to drink our coffee, but we
were obdurate.

Finally we got up from the table and Mary removed the cloth, muttering to
herself. I overheard some of it, but where any other cook would have
been furious at us for not eating her delicious dinner, the dear old
soul's rage was all directed against herself, and she was vituperating
herself in language which would not have gone through the mails.

But now the question was where and how to get our dinner so that Mary
would not suspect. To send her to church and forage in our own ice-