She brought out a perilous, double arm-load of cups and saucers, and a sugar-bowl.
"This is the service china, I suppose. You could drive nails with it."
He stared at her with idolatry. She was so variously beautiful; at the theater, the opera, the luncheon, here in a country kitchen--everywhere somebody else, and everybody of her beautiful. His hands went out to seize her again, but she tumbled the crockery crackingly on the table and waved a cup at him. "Stand back, or I'll brain you with this. There's no cream. I suppose even the cows aren't up yet. And I can't find any butter--or any bread--just these tinned biscuits."
They sat at the kitchen table. The coffee was not good, really; but she found it amusing, and he thought it was ambrosia--Mars and Venus at breakfast in an Olympian dining-room. He told her something of the sort, and implied once more that he longed to make the arrangement permanent.
"I wish you'd quit proposing before breakfast," she said. "I feel very material in the morning, anyway, and I'm having a bully time. I'm feeling far too sensible to listen to any nonsense about the simple life. I can enjoy a bit of rough road as well as anybody. I can turn in and work or do without, or dress in rags--anything for a picnic--for a while. But as a regular thing--ugh! To get breakfast once in somebody's else kitchen at an ungodly hour with a captivating stranger--glorious! But to get up every morning--every every morning, rain or shine, cold or hot, sleepy or sick or blue--no, thank you!"
"You think the rich are happier than the poor?"
"Of course they are. That's why everybody wants to be rich."
"Oh, contented! Nobody's contented except the blind, and hopeless invalids. Contentment is a question of being a sport. There's a lot of good losers that will grin if they have to walk home in the rain from the races, and there are a lot of what they call 'bum sports' that throw their winnings on the ground because the odds weren't longer. But don't tell me that there's any special joy in being poor. If I had to be poor, I suppose I'd put the best face I could on it. That happens to be my nature. It's the good sports making the best of poverty that cause so much talk; but all the poor and middlers that I've met have hated it and envied the rich.