"And some of those buttermilk men threatens not to come any more if I don't stop serving it to them." "What do you say to them, Dolly, when they object to it?" "Well, sometimes I say one thing, and sometimes another. Sometimes I say it's orders to serve it; and sometimes I say will they please to let it stand by their plate not to get me in trouble with the management; and sometimes I coax them to take it." "By an appeal to their better nature," Nancy said. "I'm glad Dick can't hear all this,--he'd think it was funny." "We don't have so much trouble with the broths," Molly said, "but so many people would rather have the cream soups Gaspard makes, that we waste a good deal." "It sours on us," Dolly elucidated. "What do you think would be the best way out of that?" "I think to charge for the invalid things," Dolly said; "people would think more of them if they was specials, and had to be paid good money for. Health bread, if you didn't call it that, would go good, if it cost five cents extra." "What would you call it?" Nancy asked. "California fruit nut bread, or something like that, and call the custards crême renversé, and the ice-cream, French ice-cream." "Oh, dear!" Nancy said, "that isn't the way I want to do things at all." "We can slip the ones that needs them a few things from time to time, can't we, Molly?" Dolly said. "We'll do it," Nancy said. "I hate the way that the most uninspired ways of doing things turn out to be the best policy after all. I don't believe in stereotyped philanthropy, but I did think I had found a way around this problem of feeding up people who needed it." "They get fed up pretty good if they do pay a regular price for it," Dolly said. "You can't get something for nothing in this world, and most everybody knows it by now." "I'm managing my restaurant a little differently," she told Collier Pratt a few days later, as she took her place at the little table beside him, where she habitually ate her dinner. "If you don't like it you are to tell me, and I'll see that you have things you will like." "This dinner is good," he said reflectively, "like French home cooking. I haven't had a real _ragoût_ of lamb since I left the pension of Madame Pellissier. Has your mysterious patroness got tired of furnishing _diners de luxe_ to the populace?" "Not exactly that," Nancy said, "but she--she wants me to try out another way of doing things." "I thought that would come. That's the trouble with patronage of any kind. It is so uncertain. There is no immediate danger of your being ousted, is there?" "No," Nancy said, "there--there is no danger of that." "I don't like that cutting you down," he said, frowning. "It would be rather a bad outlook for us all if she threw you over, now wouldn't it?" "Oh!--she won't, there's nothing to worry about, really." "It would be like my luck to have the only café in America turn me out-of-doors.--I should never eat again."