setting the table in the other room in his honor. He opened the door which led directly into the shop. Sylvia, a pathetic, slim, elderly figure in rusty black, was bending over the stove, frying flapjacks. “Has he come home?” whispered Henry.
“No, it's Mr. Meeks. I asked him to stay to supper. I told him I would make some flapjacks, and he acted tickled to death. He doesn't get a decent thing to eat once in a dog's age. Hurry and get washed. The flapjacks are about done, and I don't want them to get cold.”
Henry's face, which had fallen a little when he learned that Horace had not returned, still looked brighter than before. While Sidney Meeks never let him have the last word, yet he was much better than Sylvia as a safety-valve for pessimism. Meeks was as pessimistic in his way as Henry, although he handled his pessimism, as he did everything else, with diplomacy, and the other man had a secret conviction that when he seemed to be on the opposite side yet he was in reality pulling with the lawyer.
Sidney Meeks was older than Henry, and as unsuccessful as a country lawyer can well be. He lived by himself; he had never married; and the world, although he smiled at it facetiously, was not a pleasant place in his eyes.
Henry, after he had washed himself at the sink in the shop, entered the kitchen, where the table was set, and passed through to the sitting-room, where the lawyer was. Sidney Meeks did not rise. He extended one large, white hand affably. “How are you Henry?” said he, giving the other man's lean, brown fingers a hard shake. “I dropped in here on my way home from the post-office, and your wife tempted me with flapjacks in a lordly dish, and I am about to eat.”
“Glad to see you,” returned Henry.
“You get home early, or it seems early, now the days are getting so long,” said Meeks, as Henry sat down opposite.
“Yes, it's early enough, but I don't get any more pay.”
Meeks laughed. “Henry, you are the direct outcome of your day and generation,” said he. “Less time, and more pay for less time, is our slogan.”
“Well, why not?” returned Henry, surlily, still with a dawn of delighted opposition in his thin, intelligent face. “Why not? Look at the money that's spent all around us on other things that correspond. What's an automobile but less time and more money, eh?”
Meeks laughed. “Give it up until after supper, Henry,” he said, as Sylvia's thin, sweet voice was heard from the next room.
“If you men don't stop talking and come right out, these flapjacks will be spoiled!” she cried. The men arose and obeyed her call. “There are compensations for everything,” said Meeks, laughing, as he settled down heavily into his chair. He was a large man. “Flapjacks are compensations. Let us eat our compensations and be thankful. That's my way of saying grace. You ought always to say grace, Henry, when you have such a good cook as your wife is to get meals for you. If you had to shift for yourself, the way I do, you'd feel that it was a simple act of decency.”
“I don't see much to say grace for,” said Henry, with a disagreeable sneer.
“Oh, Henry!” said Sylvia.
“For compensations in the form of flapjacks, with plenty of butter and sugar and nutmeg,” said Meeks. “These are fine, Mrs. Whitman.”
“A good thick beefsteak at twenty-eight cents a pound, regulated by the beef trust, would be more to my liking after a hard day's work,” said Henry.
Sylvia exclaimed again, but she was not in reality disturbed. She was quite well aware that her husband was enjoying himself after his own peculiar fashion, and that, if he spoke the truth, the flapjacks were more to his New England taste for supper than thick beefsteak.
“Well, wait until after supper, and maybe you will change your mind about having something to say grace for,” Meeks said, mysteriously.
The husband and wife stared at him. “What do you mean, Mr. Meeks?” asked Sylvia, a little nervously. Something in the lawyer's manner agitated her. She was not accustomed to mysteries. Life had not held many for her, especially of late years.
Henry took another mouthful of flapjacks. “Well, if you can give me any good reason for saying grace you will do more than the parson ever has,” he said.
“Oh, Henry!” said Sylvia.
“It's the truth,” said Henry. “I've gone to meeting and heard how thankful I ought to be for things I haven't got, and things I have got that other folks haven't, and for forgiveness for breaking commandments, when, so far as I can tell, commandments are about the only things I've been able to keep without taxes—till I'm tired of it.”
“Wait till after supper,” repeated the lawyer again, with smiling mystery. He had a large, smooth face, with gray hair on the sides of his head and none on top. He had good, placid features, and an easy expression. He ate two platefuls of the flapjacks, then two pieces of cake, and a large slice of custard pie! He was very fond of sweets.
After supper was over Henry and Meeks returned to the sitting-room, and sat down beside the two front windows. It was a small, square room furnished with Sylvia's chief household treasures. There was a hair-cloth sofa, which she and Henry had always regarded as an extravagance and had always viewed with awe. There were two rockers, besides one easy-chair, covered with old-gold plush—also an extravagance. There was a really beautiful old mahogany table with carved base, of which neither Henry nor Sylvia thought much. Sylvia meditated selling enough Calkin's soap to buy a new one, and stow that away in Mr. Allen's room. Mr. Allen professed great admiration for it, to her wonderment. There was also a fine, old, gold-framed mirror, and some china vases on the mantel-shelf. Sylvia was rather ashamed of them. Mrs. Jim Jones had a mirror which she had earned by selling Calkin's soap, which Sylvia considered much handsomer. She would have had ambitions in that direction also, but Henry was firm in his resolve not to have the mirror displaced, nor the vases, although Sylvia descanted upon the superior merits of some vases with gilded pedestals which Mrs. Sam Elliot had in her parlor.
Meeks regarded the superb old table with appreciation as he sat in the sitting-room after supper. “Fine old piece,” he said.
Henry looked at it doubtfully. It had been in a woodshed of his grandfather's house, when he was a boy, and he was not as confident about that as he was about the mirror and vases, which had always maintained their parlor estate.
“Sylvia don't think much of it,” he said. “She's crazy to have one of carved oak like one Mrs. Jim Jones has.”
“Carved oak fiddlestick!” said Sidney Meeks. “It's a queer thing that so much virtue and real fineness of character can exist in a woman without the slightest trace of taste for art.”
Henry looked resentful. “Sylvia has taste, as much taste as most women,” he said. “She simply doesn't like to see the same old things around all the time, and I don't know as I blame her. The world has grown since that table was made, there's no doubt about that. It stands to reason furniture has improved, too.”
“Glad there's something you see in a bright light, Henry.”
“I must say that I like this new mission furniture, myself, pretty well,” said Henry, somewhat importantly.
“That's as old as the everlasting hills; but the old that's new is the newest thing in all creation,” said Meeks. “Sylvia is a foolish woman if she parts with this magnificent old piece for any reproduction made in job lots.”
“Oh, she isn't going to part with it. Mr. Allen will like it in his room. He thinks as much of it as you do.”
“He's right, too,” said Meeks. “There's carving for you; there's a fine grain of wood.”
“It's very hard to keep clean,” said Sylvia, as she came in rubbing her moist hands. “Now, that new Flemish oak is nothing at all to take care of, Mrs. Jones says.”
“This is worth taking care of,” said Meeks. “Now, Sylvia, sit down. I have something to tell you and Henry.”