making beetles into preserves for
dessert, he had been unable to look with undismayed eye upon these
retrograde monsters.

"Ach, take it away, Boris," sighed the host. He himself was not eating,
for was he not atoning for his sins?

Mistress Boris removed the dish with an expression of violent anger.

Just imagine a housekeeper, whose every ambition is the kitchen, when
her first dish is despatched away from the table without being touched.

The second dish--eggs stuffed with sardines--suffered the same fate.

The lawyer declared on his word of honor that they had buried his
grandfather for tasting a dish of sardines, and that every female in the
family immediately went into spasms from the smell of the same. He would
rather eat a whale than a sardine.

"Take this away, too, Mistress Boris. No one will touch it." Mistress
Boris began to mutter under her breath that it was absurd and affected
to turn up one's nose at these respectable eatables, which were quite as
good as those they had eaten in their grandfather's house. Her last
words were rather drowned by the creaking of the door as she went out.

Then followed some kind of salad, with bread crumbs. The lawyer had in
his university days received such a dangerous fever from eating such
stuff, that it would indeed be a fatal enterprise to tackle it now.

This was too much for the housekeeper. She attacked Mr. Sarvoelgyi:

"Didn't I tell you not to cook a fasting dinner? Didn't I say so? You
think everyone is as devout as you are in keeping Friday? Now you have
it. Now I am disgraced."

"It is part of the punishment I have inflicted on myself," answered
Sarvoelgyi, with humble acquiescence.

"The devil take your punishment; it is me that will come in for ridicule
if they hear about it yonder. You become more of a fool every day."

"Say what is on your tongue, my good Boris; heaven will order you to do
penance as well as me."

Mistress Boris slammed the door after her, and cried outside in bitter
disappointment.

The lawyer swore to himself that he would eat whatever followed, even if
it were poison.

It was worse: it was fish.

We have medical certificates to enable us to assert that whenever the
lawyer ate fish he promptly had to go to bed. He was forced to say that
if they chased him from the house with boiling water he could not
venture to put his teeth into it.

Mistress Boris said nothing now. She actually kept silent. As we all
know, the last