We bought white Holland shades for the windows, and made the three rooms fairly comfortable and then I turned my attention to the kitchen.
Jack said I should not have to buy anything at all; the Quartermaster Department furnished everything in the line of kitchen utensils; and, as his word was law, I went over to the quartermaster store-house to select the needed articles.
After what I had been told, I was surprised to find nothing smaller than two-gallon tea-kettles, meat-forks a yard long, and mess-kettles deep enough to cook rations for fifty men! I rebelled, and said I would not use such gigantic things.
My husband said: "Now, Mattie, be reasonable; all the army women keep house with these utensils; the regiment will move soon, and then what should we do with a lot of tin pans and such stuff?
You know a second lieutenant is allowed only a thousand pounds of baggage when he changes station." This was a hard lesson, which I learned later.
Having been brought up in an old-time community, where women deferred to their husbands in everything, I yielded, and the huge things were sent over.

I had told Mrs.Wilhelm that we were to have luncheon in our own quarters.
So Adams made a fire large enough to roast beef for a company of soldiers, and he and I attempted to boil a few eggs in the deep mess-kettle and to make the water boil in the huge tea-kettle.
But Adams, as it turned out, was not a cook, and I must confess that my own attention had been more engrossed by the study of German auxiliary verbs, during the few previous years, than with the art of cooking.
Of course, like all New England girls of that period, I knew how to make quince jelly and floating islands, but of the actual, practical side of cooking, and the management of a range, I knew nothing.
Here was a dilemma, indeed! The eggs appeared to boil, but they did not seem to be done when we took them off, by the minute-hand of the clock.
I declared the kettle was too large; Adams said he did not understand it at all.
I could have wept with chagrin! Our first meal a deux! I appealed to Jack.

He said, "Why, of course, Martha, you ought to know that things do not cook as quickly at this altitude as they do down at the sea level.

We are thousands of feet above the sea here in Wyoming." (I am not sure it was thousands, but it was hundreds at least.) So that was the trouble, and I had not thought of it! My head was giddy with the glamour, the uniform, the guard-mount, the military music, the rarefied air, the new conditions, the new interests of my life.

Heine's songs, Goethe's plays, history and romance were floating through my mind.