“Leave us keep the home fires burning,” said she impressively, and withdrew from an exposed cavern a bottle of Scotch whisky.  Standing before the safe we drank chattily.  We agreed that prohibition was a good thing for the state of Washington.  We said we were glad to deny ourselves for the sake of those weaker natures lacking self-control, including Mr. Bryan, whom the lady characterized as “just a water-spout.”

The bottle restored to security my hostess shut the thick doors upon it and twirled the lock.  Then she raised the curtains and reopened the door to the innocent spring night, after which we sat to our meatless and wheatless repast.  In place of meat we sternly contented ourselves with stewed chicken, certain of the Arrowhead fowls having refused to do their bit in eggs and now paying the penalty in a crisis when something is expected from everyone.  In place of wheat we merely had corn muffins of a very coaxing perfection.  Even under these hardships I would patriotically practice the gospel of the clean plate.

As her exploring spoon wandered over the platter of half-submerged chicken Ma Pettengill casually remarked that carefree Bohemians was always the first to suffer under prohibition, and that you couldn’t have a really good Latin Quarter in a dry town.  I let it go.  I must always permit her certain speeches of seeming irrelevance before she will consent to tell me all.  Thus a moment later as she lavished valuable butter fat upon one of the spirituelle muffins she communicated the further item that Cousin Egbert Floud still believed Bohemians was glass blowers, he having seen a troupe of such at the World’s Fair.  He had, it is true, known some section hands down on the narrow gauge that was also Bohemians, but Bohemians of any class at all was glass blowers, and that was an end of it.  No use telling him different, once he gets an idea into his poor old head.

This, too, I let pass, overcome for the moment by the infatuating qualities of the chicken stew.  But when appetites, needlessly inflamed by the lawless tippling, had at last been appeased and the lady had built her first cigarette I betrayed a willingness to hear more of the hinted connection between winter sports and Latin Quarters peopled by Bohemians, glass-blowing or otherwise.  The woman chuckled privately through the first cigarette, adeptly fashioned another, removed to a rocking-chair before the open fire and in a businesslike fervour seized a half-knitted woollen sock, upon which she fell to work.

She now remarked that there must be along the Front millions of sweaters and wristlets and mufflers and dewdads that it looked well to knit in public, so it seemed to be up to her to supply a few pairs of socks.  She said you naturally couldn’t expect these here society dames that knitted in theatres and hotel corridors to be knitting anything so ugly as socks, even if they would know how to handle four needles, which they mostly wouldn’t; but someone had to do it.  Without the slightest change of key she added that it was a long story and painful in spots, but had a happy ending, and she didn’t know as she minded telling me.