Spartan quality, which the Colonel respected, since he knew no one should eat much while shooting. He felt, though, that he might augment the lunch with this sausage, and share it with the poler and picker-upper. He might give a slice to Bobby, the retriever, who would be wet through to his hide many times, and enthusiastic still, but shaking with cold.
“Is this the best sausage that you have?” he asked the woman. “Have you nothing that does not show and is reserved for better and steadier customers?”
“This is the best sausage. There are many other sausages, as you know. But this is the best.”
“Then give me one eighth of a kilo of a sausage that is highly fortifying, but is not highly seasoned.”
“I have it,” she said. “It is a little new but exactly as you describe.”
This sausage was for Bobby.
But you do not say that you buy sausages for a dog in Italy where the worst crime is to be considered a fool and many people go hungry. You may give expensive sausage to a dog before a man who works for his living and knows what a dog goes through in water in cold weather. But you do not buy them, stating your purpose in possessing them, unless you are a fool, or a millionaire from the war and from after.
The Colonel paid for the wrapped-up package and proceeded on through the market inhaling the smell of roasted coffee and looking at the amount of fat on each carcass in the butcher section, as though he were enjoying the Dutch painters,
