Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/157

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE COMMUTATION CHOPHOUSE
137

house at the corner of Beekman and Gold streets, which I had never seen before.

"I'm a great believer in tit for tat, fair play, and all that sort of thing," said Dulcet when the waiter approached. "You gave me an excellent lunch yesterday. I intend to give you the same lunch to-day, if you can stand eating it again. Waiter! Mutton chop, baked potato, baked beans, coffee, and cheese cake. For two."

When the beans came, baked with cheese in a little brown dish, just as they were served the day before, I must confess that I was startled.

"Why, these beans are done exactly like those we had at the Commutation," I said. "Are these people doing the cooking for the chophouse?"

"Perhaps you'll have to eat chop and beans for a hundred lunches," Dulcet said. "Well, it's a hearty diet. After all, the sandwich boards simply said a hundred meals. They didn't guarantee that they would be different."

I insisted that on our way back toward the office we should stop at the Commutation Chophouse and find out from a customer what the bill of fare had been on the second day. The vision of a hundred repetitions of any meal, however good, is rather ghastly.

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.