“Apple sauce?”

“I don’t like apples in any shape.  A sour kind of potato, I call them.  They eat an awful lot of apples in our country.  That is what makes so many of our women as flat as boards, in front and behind—­especially in the Eastern States.  It’s apple-eating.  Apples ought to be taxed.  They ruin the female figure.  I’m not sure that they don’t sour the character as well.”

“Don’t you care about our English vegetables?”

“Can’t say I’m much in love with them, Mr. Heard.  Brussels sprouts, for instance—­I’m very partial to Brussels sprouts.  But the things they give you over there are the size of a bath sponge, and much the same taste, I reckon.  And the carrots!  A carrot ought to be small and round and yellow, it ought to melt in the mouth like a plum.  Those carrots aren’t carrots at all.  They’re walking sticks.  And the peas!  No, I don’t care about English peas.  Too large and too lively for me.”

“Lively?”

“That’s it.  Lively.  I shall never forget my first experience of them,” he went on, laughing.  “There were two or three in the dish; just two or three; filled it up nicely.  Looked like cannon-balls.  What do they expect me to do with these things?  I wondered.  I didn’t like to ask the waiter.  One doesn’t care to be taken for an ignorant stranger.  Well, I landed one on my plate and began carving at it, to see if there was anything eatable inside the shell, when the durned thing slipped away from my knife and crashed on to the floor.  Bounced up like a marble.  I called for a nutcracker—­’I shall want the largest you’ve got,’ I said.  They couldn’t find one.  Now I’m not the sort of man, Mr. Heard, to be beaten by a vegetable, if it really was a vegetable.  Because, you see, it behaved more like a blamed mineral.  I sent for the head waiter, and took him into my confidence.  I tried to talk English, like I’m talking to you.  ‘What d’ye call these things?’ I asked.  ‘Marrowfats, Sir.’  ’Ah, I thought they weren’t peas.  You’ve got petits POIS down on the bill of fare.  Better get that put right.  And now, how d’ye eat them?’ ’You bite them!’ That’s what he said.  ‘You bite them.’  Of course I didn’t believe him.  I thought it was just a bit of English humour, especially as the other waiter was looking the opposite way all the time.  Well, like a fool, I said to myself:  ‘No harm in trying!’ I’ve got pretty sharp teeth, you know, for a boy of my age.  That’s how I managed to do what a lot of you younger fellows couldn’t have done.  I got them fixed into the softest of that bunch of marrowfats.  But as to pulling them out again!  The head waiter, you bet, had disappeared.  And the other fellow was standing at the window with his back to me.  Looking up the street, I should say, to see if it was going to rain.”

After this little outburst, the millionaire seemed to have nothing more to say.

He was thinking. . . .