* * * * *
MacGregor good-naturedly stayed an extra week, saying he'd show me the
run of things. Secretly he tried to teach me how to cook....
As the cooking was not all of the "nature" order, but involved preparing
food for a horde of people we called "outsiders" who were employed in
Barton's publishing plant, I would have to prepare meat and bake bread
and make tea and coffee....
Barton confessed to me that a food-compromise was distasteful to him.
But he could not coerce. While lecturing about the country it was often,
even with him, "eat beefsteaks or starve!"
MacGregor was a professional Scotchman, just as there are professional
Irishmen, Englishmen and professional Southern Gentlemen ... every
Scotchman is a professional Scotchman ... but there is always something
pleasant and poetic about his being so ... it is not as it is with the
others--whose "professionalism" generally bears an unpleasant reek.
MacGregor had sandy, scanty hair, a tiny white shadow of a moustache,
kindly, weak eyes, a forehead prematurely wrinkled with minute,
horizontal lines. Burns ... of course ... he knew and quoted every line
to me. And _Sentimental Tommy_ and _Tommy and Grizel_.
* * * * *
In a week I was left in full possession of the nature restaurant.
Barton had been rendered slightly paring and mean, in matters of
money,--by smooth individuals who came to him, glowing with words of
what they could effect for him, in this or that project--individuals who
soon decamped, leaving Barton the poorer, except in experience.
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