From the viewpoint of the conservation board that may have been true, but to Carter it was nothing short of criminal to allow these balls of fried barley flour to masquerade under the same name.
“Don’t call ’em doughnuts,” he growled, “’cause they aren’t. Invent a new name for them.”
“War doughnuts?” suggested Mrs. Carter anxiously.
“War nothing!” sputtered Carter. “They don’t even belong to the same family.”
Whereupon he turned to his coffee, sweetened with a new kind of sticky substance that tasted like an inferior grade of molasses. There were those who maintained that it was just as good as sugar for sweetening. They were liars—bold-faced liars or they had lost their sense of taste. They belonged to the same class as people who maintained that coffee was better without sugar—that so one enjoyed the taste of the native berry. One might just as well argue that flapjacks for the same reason were best without sirup; cake without frosting; bread without butter.
Carter found his breakfast spoiled for him at precisely the period in life when he was prepared most to enjoy his breakfast. This was extremely irritating. It sent him to the office every morning with a grouch that did not wear off until toward noon, when it was renewed by having to pay twice what he should for a tasteless lunch. His cigars were the only thing that held up well in flavor, and he began to smoke too many of them.
Carter still followed each day’s news of the nation’s part in the great war with honest pride. He liked the big way his country was going about its preparations. He rolled the dramatic figures over his tongue and gloated over the scale of the various projects. Six hundred millions appropriated for airplanes!
“We’ll show ’em,” he announced to Culver. “We’ll have the air over there black with planes!”
And that job at Hog Island! They were planning to build fifty ways there inside of a year—just put them down on a marshy island.
“Nothing small about your Uncle Sam,” he chuckled.
When the inevitable scandals began to be whispered and congressional investigations were started, Carter frowned.
“If these stories are true,” he declared, “the grafters ought to be lynched; if they’re not we ought to lynch the darn-fool congressmen who are interrupting the game.”