Claire was sufficiently French to be intolerant of badly cooked food, and instead of resigning herself to eat and grumble, after the usual habit of lodging-house dwellers, resolutely set to work to improve the situation. The coffee machine had now a chafing-dish as companion, and it was a delightful change of work to set the two machines to work to provide a dainty meal. "High Tea" consisted as a rule of coffee and some light dish, the materials for which were purchased on the way home. On hungry days, when work had been unusually trying, the butcher supplied cutlets, which were grilled with tomatoes, or an occasional quarter of a pound of mushrooms: on economical days the humble kipper--legendary food of all spinsters in lodgings!--was transformed into quite a smart and restaurant-ey dish, separated from its bones, pounded with butter and flavouring, and served in neat little mounds on the top of hot buttered toast. Moreover, Claire was a proficient in the making of omelettes, and it was astonishing how large and tempting a dish could be compounded of two eggs, and the minutest scrap of ham left over from the morning's breakfast! "Every luxury of the season, with the smell thrown in! In _nice_ cooking the smell is almost the best part. All the cedars in Lebanon wouldn't smell as good at this moment as this nice ham-ey coffee-y frizzle," Claire declared one Friday evening as she served the meal on red-hot plates, and glowed with delight at her own sleight of hand. "Don't you admire eggs for looking so small, when they possess such powers of expansion? All the result of beating. Might make a simile out of that, mightn't you?" "Might, but won't," the English teacher replied, sipping luxuriously at her coffee. "I'm not a teacher any more at this moment. I'm a gourmand, pure and simple, and I'll stay a gourmand straight on till this omelette is finished. When all trades fail, you might go out as a missioner to women living in diggings, and teach them how to prepare their meals, and sell chafing-dishes by instalment payments at the door, as the touts sell sewing machines to the maids. It would be a noble vocation!"