"I suppose it is better than starving," she remarked apologetically, adjusting her glasses in order to find the next best apple for Herbert after Harold had given the best to Elsie, and as she peeled her apple, she added with some instinct of regret that she was offering her guests refreshments so meagre:-- "How much better turkey and plum pudding sound in the old Christmas stories than they are when you have them!" Elsie did not agree with this view. "I think it is much better to _have_ them," she said. "But in your mind's eye--" pleaded Elizabeth. "I don't know so well about that eye!" said Elsie. "Oh, but, Elsie," insisted Elizabeth with a rising enthusiasm, "in Dickens' _Christmas Carol_ wouldn't you rather the big prize turkey were whirled away in the cab to the Bob Cratchits?" "I must say that I should _not_," contended Elsie. "But the plum pudding, Elsie!" cried Elizabeth, now in the full glow of a beautiful ardor; "when Mrs. Cratchit brings in the plum pudding looking like a speckled cannon-ball, hard and firm and blazing with brandy and with Christmas holly stuck in the top of it, wouldn't you rather the little Cratchits ate _that_?" "Indeed I would!" said Elsie; "for I never cared for that pudding; they were welcome to it." Elizabeth dropped her head and was silent; then she murmured, in wounded loyalty to the Cratchits: "It _must_ have been good! Because Dickens said they ate all of it and wanted more. But they tried to look as though they'd had quite sufficient; and I think they were very nice about it, Elsie, for children who had had so little training. They behaved as very well bred, indeed." "I don't doubt it," said Elsie. "I have nothing against their manners. And I suppose they thought it a good pudding! I merely remarked that _I_ did _not_ think it a good pudding! They had their opinion, and I have my opinion of that pudding." The subject was abandoned, but a moment later revived by Herbert, sitting at Elizabeth's side:-- "Dickens had a great many more things in the _Carol_ than the turkey and the plum pudding," he observed, with his habit of taking in everything; and he began with a memorized list of the _Carol's_ Christmas luxuries in one heap--passing from geese to punch. "I always like Dickens: he gives you plenty," he concluded. "Oh, bother!" said Harold, the Kentucky Saxon whose forefathers had been immigrants from Dickens' land. "We have everything in Kentucky that they had, and more besides. They can keep their Dickens!" "Oh, but Harold," pleaded Elizabeth, "we haven't any American Christmas stories! Not one old fairy tale--not one!" "We don't want any old English fairy tales. American children don't want fairy tales. Couldn't we have them if we wanted them? I should say so. Can't we make anything in our country that we want?" "But the little Cratchits, Harold!" insisted Elizabeth, "we do want the little Cratchits!" "We have plenty of American Cratchits just as good--and much worse."