Frankly, neither did Fred Starratt, but he held his peace.  He was thinking just where he would gather enough money together to pay Mrs. Finn’s questionable substitute.

The guests arrived shortly and there were the usual stiff, bromidic greetings.  Mrs. Hilmer had been presented to Fred first ... a little, spotless, homey Scandinavian type, who radiated competent housekeeping and flawless cooking.  The Starratts had once had just such a shining-faced body for a neighbor—­a woman who ran up the back stairs during the dinner hour with a bit of roasted chicken or a pan of featherweight pop-overs or a dish of crumbly cookies for the children.  Mrs. Starratt, senior, had acknowledged her neighbor’s culinary merits ungrudgingly, tempering her enthusiasm, however, with a swift dab of criticism directed at the lady’s personality.

“My, but isn’t she Dutch, though!” frequently had escaped her.

Somehow the characterization had struck Fred Starratt as very apt even in his younger days.  And as he shook hands with Mrs. Hilmer these same words came to mind.

Hilmer disturbed him.  He was a huge man with a rather well-chiseled face, considering his thickness of limb, and his blond hair fell in an untidy shower about his prominent and throbbing temples.  Fred felt him to be a man without any inherited social graces, yet he contrived to appear at ease.  Was it because he was disposed to let the women chatter?  No, that could not account for his acquired suavity, for silence is very often much more awkward than even clumsy attempts at speech.

As the dinner progressed, Fred Starratt began to wonder just what had tempted Helen to arrange this little dinner party for the Hilmers.  When she had broached the matter, her words had scarcely conveyed their type.  A woman who had helped his wife out at the Red Cross Center during the influenza epidemic could be of almost any pattern.  But immediately he had gauged her as one of his wife’s own kind.  Helen and her women friends were not incompetent housewives, but their efforts leaned rather to an escape from domestic drudgery than to a patient yielding to its yoke.  If they discussed housekeeping at all, it was with reference to some new labor-saving device flashing across the culinary horizon.  But Mrs. Hilmer’s conversation thrilled with the pride of her gastronomic achievements without any reference to the labor involved.  She invested her estate as housekeeper for her husband with a commendable dignity.  It appeared that she took an enormous amount of pains with the simplest dishes.  It was incredible, for instance, how much thought and care and time went into a custard which she described at great length for Helen’s benefit.

“But that takes hours and hours!” Helen protested.

“But it’s a real custard,” Hilmer put in, dryly.