Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/204

 "No," Don answered simply.

"Both sides." Pittsey laughed. "You're the poorest pair of kitchen apprentices I ever saw." He bustled around, with the deftness of a restaurant waiter, adding forgotten dishes to the table, watching the "tomato slush" browning in the oven, or turning his smelts in the sputtering frying-pan. "Cut your bread thicker," he directed Don. "Your toast will be as dry as cinders. . . . Go out and buy us the squeeze of a lemon," he ordered Conroy. "Three for five, they should be. I'd make you a fish sauce if I had a recipe. . . . When I graduate out of newspaper work into literature, the first book I write will be a cook book. 'Butter the size of an egg. He dropped a slice of it into his frying-pan. "That's how the common cook books put it. And you're supposed to know it was a hen and not an ostrich that laid the egg! I'll change all that. . . . Not on the top, you clam! Your toast will taste like a gasometer. Do it in the lower oven, on the broiler. Put it up close to the flame."

The walls of the shabby dining-room had been covered with posters, gathered by the enterprising Pittsey from news-stands and book-shops. Between the windows—where a leaking roof had discoloured the plaster—he had tacked up a collection of printed "letters of rejection" which had come to him, with returned manuscripts, from newspaper offices and the editors of magazines. Don's student lamp lit the table, with its "print table-cloth" (as Pittsey called the spread of newspapers), its sugar in a tobacco tin, its milk