even licked his arms, as Mr. Silva's cow licked rock salt in the corner of the pasture.
In Hale's Turning such allusions had menaced the neat precarious cohorts of his childish ideals, like vandal dogs among tin soldiers. They had riled waters which, since the dawn of consciousness, had been limpid. Walter's stories, the minister's patronage, the evangelist's religious debauchery, Miss Mason's myopic dogmatism, the head master's coercion, had aroused his scorn, because they fell below the twenty-four-carat standard of fitness that prevailed in the privacy of Aunt Verona's kitchen. Thrust into a civilization adapted to the needs of little Nova Scotia at large, and bereft of the touchstone of Aunt Verona's interpretative faculty (even Aunt Verona had not assayed half the specimens of truth-ore he might have submitted), he had been shocked by the divergence between his notion of true gold and the base alloy in public currency. Having been nourished for twelve years on dishes seasoned to his palate, then brusquely confronted with dishes from which he had been spared by guardian angels, he had been nauseated. He had eyed them with the candour of a child whose idealistic development had not been hampered, and had immediately detected adulterations, which he with childlike inexorableness condemned. To have accepted the dishes would have meant swallowing the adulterations for the sake of a few honest currants and cloves, or persuading himself that adulterated food was the most wholesome, as all the other adolescents seemed to be doing. But such a course would have been a repudiation of Aunt Verona's kitchen, would have implied that its eclecticism had been some sort of hoax, a sham as petty as the talk of gold cobble-stones in heaven. That constituted a reductio ad absurdum, for nothing in life could shake his faith in Aunt Verona's kitchen. Whether the method of living he had learnt there were right or wrong
