"Three rousing cheers!" said he, and the Mixer responded with "Happy
days!"
As on that former occasion, the draught of spirits flooded my being
with a vast consciousness of personal worth and of good feeling toward
my companions. With a true insight I suddenly perceived that one might
belong to the great lower middle-class in America and still matter in
the truest, correctest sense of the term.
As we fell hungrily to the food, the Mixer did not fail to praise my
cooking of the trout, and she and Cousin Egbert were presently
lamenting the difficulty of obtaining a well-cooked meal in Red Gap.
At this I boldly spoke up, declaring that American cookery lacked
constructive imagination, making only the barest use of its
magnificent opportunities, following certain beaten and
all-too-familiar roads with a slavish stupidity.
"We nearly had a good restaurant," said the Mixer. "A Frenchman came
and showed us a little flash of form, but he only lasted a month
because he got homesick. He had half the people in town going there
for dinner, too, to get away from their Chinamen--and after I spent a
lot of money fixing the place up for him, too."
I recalled the establishment, on the main street, though I had not
known that our guest was its owner.
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