for his wife and the other ladies of the group to pass. Then he entered the dining-room, followed by his grandson and the other young men. The dining-room was another light, spacious, and graciously beautiful room in the old New England style: through the open windows one saw the deep green and gold of trees and flowers in the embowered magic of the setting, and the fragrance of sweet drowsy air breathed on the curtains and flowed through the room.
The snowy table had a great bowl of fresh-cut wood flowers in the centre: the food was also native, plain old American, and superbly cooked: there was a thick pea-soup, fried chicken, plump and tender, done superbly to a juicy, delicately encrusted brown: there were candied sweet potatoes, string beans, cooked the Southern way with the succulent sweet seasoning of pork, stewed golden corn, and creamy mashed potatoes, a deep smooth gravy, rich and brown and thick, sliced tomatoes and sliced cucumbers, no alcoholic beverages, but iced tea, cold and tall and fragrant in high tinkling glasses rimed with ice, flaky biscuits, smoking hot, and for dessert, fresh apple-pie, hot and crusty, hued with cinnamon and flanked by thick fresh squares of pungent yellow cheese.
It was, in short, a plain but wholesome and most appetizing meal, completely American in its flavour and abundance, and superbly cooked, most fitting to this house; the simple green and natural, casual beauty of the place, the life, the people, the homely gracious hospitality of democracy.
It is true, the meal was also rather Southern in its cooking and its quality—a fact that was not surprising, however, when one remembered that Mr. Joel’s present wife had been a famous Southern belle from the blue-grass region of Kentucky.
One not only remembered this fact, it was difficult for one not to remember it; Mrs. Joel herself made her romantic origins evident. Although she was a woman in her early sixties with white hair, she was still remarkably preserved, and her manners, graces, dimpled smiles, her roguish glances and her languishing soft drawl were still the familiar stock-in-trade of the Dixieland coquette.
She was certainly what is called “a fine figure of a woman”; her figure was tall, spacious, amply proportioned, her face, although beginning to show the signs of age—a slightly wrinkled plumpness like the skin of a full but slightly withered apple—was still almost as soft and white and tender as a child’s: she had almost all her natural teeth and they were white
