"Yes, of course it would, and such things have happened. But written menus are not binding contracts, but only suggestions, and when you and Dick recklessly eat up all the meat between you some night,--personally I should know better than to join you in your extravagance,--then you will have to modify your next day's menu and either plan a new meal or substitute something else for the meat you had arranged for. But still you will find written menus a great help if you use them sensibly and do not feel bound to follow them literally. Now let us begin to play the game. You write down a dinner for to-night, and then I will undertake the thankless task of criticizing it." Dolly gazed thoughtfully at the chandelier a few moments and then wrote rapidly. Presently she read glibly: "Potato soup. Lamb pot pie with dumplings; boiled rice; macaroni and cheese. Tapioca pudding. Coffee." Mrs. Thorne smiled. "Poor Fred! If that is the sort of meal you are arranging to give him, I think he had better stay where he is. Now think a minute. Potato soup first, and potatoes are starchy; next, boiled rice, dumplings and macaroni,--more starch; and last, tapioca pudding! Starchier and starchier, to parody Alice in Wonderland." Dolly pouted. "Well, I am perfectly sure he would eat that dinner thankfully and say it was a good one. He would never know he was eating starch if you did not put it into his head. I think it is all nonsense to point such things out to a man, anyway; it makes him notional about his food." "Later on he would wonder why on earth he had dyspepsia, my child. You would not like to have a dyspeptic husband, would you? People who have poor digestions are proverbially cross, you know, and too much starch is certain to ruin even the very best of stomachs in time. "Now let me explain what I took it for granted you knew already. You must not have too much of any one ingredient in your food; not too much fat, or starch, or sugar or anything else, because it is not wholesome. The perfect dinner is like this: First a good soup; then meat with one green and one starchy vegetable; then a fresh vegetable salad dressed lightly with oil; then a very simple sweet; coffee last; or, omitting the sweet, coffee alone. Of course you and I cannot afford to have dinners like that all the year around, because green vegetables cost too much, but that is the ideal toward which we must strive. In place of the things we cannot have, we must have substitutes as nearly resembling them as may be. In summer, of course, it is the easiest thing in the world to have salads and green vegetables, and in winter we must do the best we can without them. Now try another menu, and do not mind my criticisms. And put a date on this one, so we can tell the time of year and see whether or not you are having the proper things; suppose you say this is a March dinner." Dolly again consulted the chandelier, and after much study produced this result: