"It's like a lot of other things we think far ahead," urged Jim. "The only reason why they're far off is because we think them so. It's a thought--and a thought is as near the moment we think it as it will ever be."
"I guess that's so--to a wild-eyed reformer," said the colonel. "But go on. Develop your thought a little. Have some more dressing."
"Thanks, I believe I will," said Jim. "And a little more of the cranberry sauce. No more turkey, please."
"I'd like to see the school class that could prepare this dinner," said Mrs. Woodruff.
"Why," said Jim, "you'd be there showing them how! They'd get credits in their domestic-economy course for getting the school dinner--and they'd bring their mothers into it to help them stand at the head of their classes. And one detail of girls would cook one week, and another serve. The setting of the table would come in as a study--flowers, linen and all that. And when we get a civilized teacher, table manners!"
"I'd take on that class," said the hired man, winking at Selma Carlson, the maid, from somewhere below the salt. "The way I make my knife feed my face would be a great help to the children."
"And when the food came on the table," Jim went on, with a smile at his former fellow-laborer, who had heard most of this before as a part of the field conversation, "just think of the things we could study while eating it. The literary term for eating a meal is discussing it--well, the discussion of a meal under proper guidance is much more educative than a lecture. This breast-bone, now," said he, referring to the remains on his plate. "That's physiology. The cranberry-sauce--that's botany, and commerce, and soil management--do you know, Colonel, that the cranberry must have an acid soil--which would kill alfalfa or clover?"
"Read something of it," said the colonel, "but it didn't interest me much."
"And the difference between the types of fowl on the table--that's breeding. And the nutmeg, pepper and cocoanut--that's geography. And everything on the table runs back to geography, and comes to us linked to our lives by dollars and cents--and they're mathematics."
"We must have something more than dollars and cents in life," said Jennie. "We must have culture."