FROM THE LIFE
was going over the contents of his larder in his mind as he helped her across the Square. He did not speak. And she was obviously too weak to speak.
6
There was a characteristic reason why he did not consider taking her to a restaurant.
He had made a study of foods and their prices—a study as careful as any that he made subsequently into the details of life and local color for his romances of Elizabethan and medieval times. And he understood how grossly the restaurants overcharged. He knew, for example, that rolled oats, in bulk, cost him two and one-half cents a pound; that there were six teacupfuls in a pound, and that half a teacupful made a portion for one meal. Cornmeal, at two cents a pound, gave only four cups to the pound; oatmeal, at two and a half cents a pound, ran five cups to the pound; and hominy, at five cents a pound, four cups to the pound. (These, of course, were the prices of 1899.) He paid 30 cents a pound for coffee; there were 96 teaspoonfuls in a pound; and he used a teaspoonful to a cup of coffee—stingily. He paid 50 cents for a pound of tea, of 128 teaspoonfuls. He had figured out that granulated sugar cost him one- eighth of a cent for a spoonful. There were, usually. 240 potatoes in a bushel, and a cent's worth made a portion. He had learned where to get meat
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