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Next day Em fed the rest of the doughnuts to a poor man who came and said he was starving. “Thank you, marm,” said he, with his heart full of gratitude and his mouth full of doughnuts; “I ha’ n’t had anything as good as this since I left Connecticut twenty years ago.”

That little subtlety consoled Em, but still she found it hard to bear up under her apparent inability to do her duty by Lute’s critical palate. Once when Lute brought Col. Hi Thomas home to dinner they had chicken pie. The colonel praised it and passed his plate a third time.

“Oh, but you ought to eat some of mother’s chicken pie,” said Lute. “Mother never puts an under crust in her chicken pies, and that makes ’em juicier.”

Same way when they had fried pork and potatoes; Lute could not understand why the flesh of the wallowing, carnivorous western hog should n’t be as white and firm and sweet as the meat of the swill-fed Yankee pig. And why were the Hubbard squashes so tasteless and why was maple syrup so very different? Yes, amid all his professional duties Lute found time to note and remark upon this and other similar things, and of course Em was–by implication, at least–held responsible for them all.

And Em did try so hard, so very hard, to correct the evils and to answer the hypercritical demands of Lute’s foolishly petted and spoiled appetite. She warred valorously with butchers, grocers, and hucksters; she sent down east to Mother Baker for all the famous family recipes; she wrestled in speech and in practice with that awful Hulda; she experimented long and patiently; she blistered her pretty face and burned her little hands over that kitchen range–yes, a slow, constant martyrdom that conscientious wife willingly endured for years in her enthusiastic determination to do her duty by Lute. Doughnuts, chicken-pies, boiled dinners, layer-cakes, soda biscuits, flapjacks, fish balls, baked beans, squash pies, corned-beef hash, dried-apple sauce, currant wine, succotash, brown bread–how valorously Em toiled over them, only to be rewarded with some cruel reminder of how “mother” used to do these things! It was terrible; a tedious martyrdom.

Lute–mind you–Lute was not wilfully cruel; no, he was simply and irremediably a heedless idiot of a man, just as every married man is, for a spell, at least. But it broke Em’s heart, all the same.

Lute’s mother came to visit them when their first child was born, and she lifted a great deal of trouble off the patient wife. Old Miss Baker always liked Em; had told the minister three years ago that she knew Em would make Lute a good Christian wife. They named the boy Moses, after the old judge who was dead, and old Miss Baker said he should have his gran’pa’s watch when he got to be twenty-one.

Old Miss Baker always stuck by Em; may be she remembered how the old judge had talked once on a time about his mother’s cooking. For all married men are, as I have said, idiotically cruel about that sort of thing. Yes, old Miss Baker braced Em up wonderful; brought a lot of dried catnip out west with her for the baby; taught Em how to make salt-rising bread; told her all about stewing things and broiling things and roasting things; showed her how to tell the real Yankee codfish from the counterfeit–oh, she just did Em lots of good, did old Miss Baker!

The rewards of virtue may be slow in coming, but they are sure to come. Em’s three boys–the three bouncing boys that came to Em and Lute–those three boys waxed fat and grew up boisterous, blatant appreciators of their mother’s cooking. The way those boys did eat mother’s doughnuts! And mother’s pies–wow! Other boys–the neighbors’ boys–came round regularly in troops, battalions, armies, and like a consuming fire licked up the wholesome viands which Em’s skill and liberality provided for her own boys’ enthusiastic playmates. And all those boys–there must have been millions of ’em–were living, breathing, vociferous testimonials to the unapproachable excellence of Em’s cooking.